Creative Governance Begins With People

A small group of thoughtful people could change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.
Margaret Mead

It is very common for people to blame the government they elected for every malady they faced. Yet as the famous anthropologist Margaret Mead says, A small group of thoughtful people could change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.

Creative Governance begins with people.

People talked about rights, but hardly ever about their responsibilities. As a consequence, billions of dollars in budget, resources and efforts were wasted. The community suffered as a result.

A blog on Andrew Mawson's book, The Social Entrepreneur: Making Communities Work reminded me of my own experience in Mauritius. Let me relate Mawsons experience first before sharing my own.

In the mid-1990s, a 35-year-old woman called Jean Vialls who was dying from cancer, was struggling to care for her two children, aged 16 and two, as well as her elderly parents. She was not getting the support she needed from social services and the National Health Service (NHS).Mawson decided to do something about it.

This was what Mawson wrote about the meeting with NHS and health officials:

This, then, was the NHS in action, and it was heartbreaking to witness. All the people in the room were incredibly well-meaning. They were in the caring professions for good reasons, probably to do with wanting to help and make a difference. But, somewhere along the way, they had lost touch with the realities of the lives of the people with whom they were dealing. The core business of the welfare state was meant to be people like Jean. But she had been forgotten about in the scramble to demonstrate equality of opportunity, or efficiency of delivery, or equitable use of public money. The NHS did not seem to understand who the customer was.

Mawson’s efforts to do something about the situation was stuck in bureaucracy until the Health Minister intervened. The success achieved (Bromley-by-Bow) was cited as a prototype for healthy living centres, aimed at improving health among poorer communities, and that would belong to the communities that they serve and not be parachuted in from the government machinery. However, without community involvement, many of the 257 centres established with millions in funding had proved unsustainable and were running out of money.

Who is at fault? I think it is a combination of both the government and the community. Perhaps funding from the Government should only be provided if it comes from a community initiative and not the other way round. I leave you to ponder over this point.

To read the full article, go to:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2008/jan/09/socialenterprises.regeneration

I will share my experience in Mauritius in my next blog.

Talk on Creative Governance

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