Monday 22 March 2010

Chapter 9 continued

But what is Louise’s view on the pitfalls and challenges of attempting to run a more business like model, particularly in the disability sector? How does the emergent vision based around an entrepreneurial model compare to the purist rights model where government and local authority agencies might have been expected to fund equality and consultative organisations out of a statutory responsibility, if not a duty under the recent Disability Equality Scheme section of the Disability Discrimination Act?

“I can see both sides to that argument. There is certainly a role for BDRC and other organisations to represent the rights and views of disabled people. But I can also appreciate the issues facing many user-led organisations who perhaps are not in the position of BDRC, particularly if it is, for example, a learning disability based organisation or perhaps an organisation where all the staff, volunteers and board have a visual impairment.

“There are lots of barriers that those user organisations will face in fighting their way through funding and procurement procedures.

“I can completely see that, in some respects, we spend so much time making funding applications and justifying our own existence when actually there is a very good argument to be said that we shouldn’t have to do all of that and if the money automatically came through and we could spend a lot more of our time doing what we really want to do, supporting, representing or empowering disabled people.

“However, who is to say that BDRC is the best placed organisation to do that? I can see from a public sector point of view, they have to consider value for money, best fit, openness, transparency in terms of who they give their money to.

“How does an organisation that is not in receipt of money, but is providing or has the potential to provide a good service get funding if they are not given the opportunity to apply or to take part in an open, fair, transparent process?

“I think there does need to be that open, fair and transparent process. What I would say in response is that I am not entirely sure that the processes and all the evidence that we have to provide, as a third sector organisation, are always proportionate to the funding that is available or that we are being given.

“I will just give one example around that, I have seen, since I started work here – that’s four and half years, the fact that six times more work this year, 2009, is being put into funding applications and tendering, than was the case when I started in 2005.

“It is not the case that our applications are deteriorating, probably quite the opposite, we have quite a few experienced members of staff here now. It’s simply down to the competition, money is becoming smaller and there is more competition.

“The sad thing is that in many cases organisations like ourselves have to compete against the private sector, big national organisations and how can little old BDRC whose Chief Executive and managers fit bids for funding on the side of their day job, possibly compete fairly and equitably with big multi-national private companies that probably employ departments of tender bid writers and have much better economies of scale?

“I hope that answers the question in a way, there are pitfalls and I would like to reach a situation that is somewhere in the middle.”

Louise’s point about whether it is actually the role of BDRC to be a campaigning or even a consultative organisation is a very relevant one and a question which reflects a view from BDRG originator Bob Findlay who suggests that there are two broad types of organisation of disabled people, those that deliver services such as BDRC, DIALs, self-advocacy groups or centres for integrated, inclusive or independent living and those that provide a voice for disabled people such as coalitions, councils, consortiums and, of course, rights groups.

The dilemma being, as Bob previously inferred in this book, that the ‘voice’ organisations are at a distinct disadvantage in terms of getting either core or project funding, not least because by their very nature they are ethically and ideologically obliged to snap at, on an ongoing basis, if not give damaging bites to, the proverbial hand that feeds.

A more recent development in both Birmingham and the wider West Midlands has been the development of networks of disability organisations, previously funded on a regional level by Regional Action West Midlands and currently by the BASIS stream of the Big Lottery Fund and in Birmingham by the city council.

Birmingham Disability Resource Centre, alongside other disability organisations, has started to develop the Birmingham Disability Network with funding support from the council. Ultimately, this has the potential to provide a more strategic framework for third sector disability organisations in Birmingham to consult, inform, network and even campaign on behalf of their members.

Obviously, this is a very different beast to, for instance, the Birmingham Disability Rights Group which was created from the grass roots level and thenceforth was entirely, exclusively and directly controlled by individual disabled people.

A network does, however, if successful, still have the potential to be strategically powerful and influential, especially where large and locally respected organisations reach consensus on pertinent issues. The key being whether the member organisations, of or for disabled people, will have their own genuinely applied mechanisms for listening to and then representing the views, aspirations and concerns of disabled people within their organisations.

The other point being whether the network can maintain its own integrity, autonomy and independence from the funder, in this case Birmingham City Council. As we approach the end of this history, perhaps this development brings us full circle and a similar history book in 20 years time might hopefully talk about the success of the Birmingham Disability Network.

To close our history we asked some of our oral history interviewees for their final reflections and thoughts about the future, starting with BDRG founder Bob Findlay, whose characteristically forthright critique within the social oppression model of disability remains as sharp as it was back in 1985:

“I would never knock the work being done here, but I think that the economic development ethos can play to the stereotype that disabled people only have meaning if they are in employment. There is no doubt that having economic power is important.

“I feel it is important to get disabled people into work, but to have that as your central focus, in my opinion, means that you end up playing the normal game i.e. not everything about disability is about employment and the centre should not move away from looking at barriers (the social and cultural barriers) to simply focus again on the individual needs of disabled people to get into work.

“Obviously my politics say to me that individuals are important in their own right but as a dominant ideology, in practice it actually oppresses the disabled person by promoting the individual tragedy model and becomes a way of controlling us by individualising our own experiences. Whereas the social oppression approach says that individuals in a social group are defined by the structures and the culture and attitude and, if you like at the macrocosmic level, the barriers that society creates and we cannot as individuals overcome all those barriers simply taking an individual approach.

“So finding disabled people work isn’t wrong, but it is not a radical agenda. I would never knock it and I am proud – I recognise the work that it is doing.”

Here our Vice chair, Andy Beaton, reflects on the reasons for the centre’s success:

“I don’t think the BDRC would still exist had there not been that commitment of potential service users, people who had different functions in the centre and it is quite a hard balance to get.

“Part of the training I do on good governance is that you need to let the staff manage their side of things and I think the centre gets that balance about right. Maybe it didn’t always, because it is quite hard when people have got a real passion for their subject and the zeal, time and commitment to do it. But again the centre has come through all these ups and downs.

“Again the proof of the pudding is that the centre is still functioning and potentially flourishing in the current environment and still supporting disabled people with a range of services, certainly involving the potential for people to be employed in whatever work environment structure they want as opposed to what someone else imposes on them. I would love to see this develop more. Things like the sort of services of disability equality, the taxi training and access audits.

“I think the centre has got the tools to do these sort of things. I think, for instance, that it could take a lead role in the Birmingham Disability Network. It will help to strengthen these things to move forward.

“The future of the third sector in delivering services against contracts is about the potential for collaborative working and that is something that BDRC is getting involved with in a big way and that is a very positive thing. It is something I have been pleased to see move forward more now than it did before.”

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