Transforming Communities
The year is 1997 and we were some 5 years into the creation of Community Employment (CE). The task was simple, complex and daunting . Transform the temporary employment scheme know as SES and improve the experience for workers, the transfer to full time jobs , and the impact on the ground of their work in communities. I decided we need to do more. This was an opportunity to create a significant social enterprise adventure across urban and rural Ireland . It was also an opportunity to build coalitions with Educational providers and open pathways for CE Supervisors and participants into learning and education. It had potential to be transformative in terms of hope and opportunity at a time when unemployment was the scourge of the country. It also had potential to transform the way FAS did business with communities. It was an opportunity to develop a more focused and professional results measured approach for the use and application of public funds. It also opened up the possibility of empowering and upskilling the voluntary committees at local level who managed and drove the work of individual projects.
There were obstacles within weeks of commencing a Minister wanted to close it down and stop it. The facilitation and enabling of those first groups of Supervisors who embrace the new approach resulted in them persuading Government to let it continue. A delicate line was walked in empowering the Supervisors and not upsetting the Department and Senior managers. The second major challenge was within 12 months of starting came the demand to increase participation from 5000 to 50000 nationally. We did it on schedule , without dropping quality of approach and within the per capita budget allocations . We wrote the rule book and for the first time managed to create flexibility in how the rules and operation worked so that urban and rural projects could be shaped differently in accord with local need and local reality.
I particularly enjoying innovating in the way in which the learning and development happened. The Supervisor learning happened through an Action Learning Programme centred around residential workshops (16 days in a year) , local workshops (6) and mentor sessions with the dedicated team of facilitators built up by myself and drawing on co-operative working and delivery arrangements with VEC (now ETB) Adult Education Officers and Regional Technical Colleges like Tralee , Galway, Letterkenny and Dundalk. A unique feature of participant learning that I developed and protected against the objections of traditional Fas Training staff , was the provision of Own Time Development. This enabled participants to have a small budget (300 ) to purchase a course/courses/experiences that helped develop them as individuals. Some picked new learning, some the development of what they were already passionate about. Some were creative like the part time small farmers in North Mayo who collectively pooled their resource and hired a person to teach them maintenance skills for their milking machines.
I was also determined to push the barriers and frontiers of how Supervisors thought and looked at the world . We brought in speakers from Ireland and the UK and opened issues like Climate Change, new economic models, the future of work , and political activism. I travelled to visit and evaluate on the ground projects across the country from the Dingle , to Waterford, Galway to Dublin and Donegal to Louth. The impact the entire network of learning and project delivery was having on individuals and local communities made it all worthwhile.
The extracts from the Newsletter ( online publishing and social media had yet to be invented) that was designed to promote the entire initiative but written by participants, Supervisors, facilitators and Community Volunteers prove and demonstrate the range of activity ; homeless services (yes we had homeless back then) , spiritual and environmental initiatives , sport clubs , men’s groups, arts and culture . By the time I left FAS in 1999 over 3000 Supervisors had undertook the programme and some 110,000 participants had taken part in Projects.
Newsletter _ Perspectives
