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THE VINCE HINES FOUNDATION Community Education and Training Services UK Registered Charity No.: 269681. Established 1975. UK Registered Education & Training Provider. Department for Education and Skills Registration No.:10006844 E-mail: cmass@ubol.com |
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![Text Box: Summary of Recommendations By Britain’s Self-Help Movement [Click here to read text]](image11253.png)
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Statement by the Vince Hines Foundation Trustees Current world trends are growing pointers to the crucial requirements for Britain to continue making rapid adjustments in positioning her diverse citizens through cohesive and lasting programmes in order to pull together for the common good.
The Foundation’s eighteen months re-structuring, 2006-2008, is now complete. New systems are in place for the next five years, part of which is up and running to be reviewed annually.
During the period of re-structuring, the Charity’s case work operations and fund-raising activities were reduced significantly. Operational income and expenditure were provided by direct support of the Charity’s Trustees and members, as reflected in the Charity’s account for that period. The Foundation depended heavily on volunteers. The Charity will now accept donations from members of the pubic for its work.
The Charity’s re-structuring processes drew on relevant research, focus groups among beneficiaries and potential beneficiaries. The Foundation drew on its own thirty three years successful work in self-help and community development, working at the grass-roots, in Britain’s urban areas, including London, among some of the most disadvantaged of our communities.
The Foundation’s Trustees drew on seminars and public meetings called by government and local government departments and the voluntary and community sector, outreach work, information, advice and clients’ referrals. The Trustees also noted current government strategies designed to develop community partnerships and cohesion in urban and rural areas, innovation in education and training, support for families, children, young people, small and medium sized businesses.
The Foundation also drew on the history of self-help initiatives by African, Caribbean and Asian immigrants from the British Commonwealth, during the 1950s, 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s, who initiated Britain’s credit union movement; our modern carnival movement; our supplementary education [Saturday school] movement; our sound systems [mobile discotheque] movement; our grassroots social enterprise movement; our community radio movement and our strong anti-racist, community and diversity movement, culminating into race, sexuality, gender, disability, age and religious equalities Acts of Parliament. These, currently the United Kingdom pride and joy, are now taken for granted in our everyday activities.
The Foundation and Associates therefore recognised that there is an historical pedigree for innovations and creativities among Britain’s grassroots communities, which are still vibrant and productive, good for Britain and needed to be tapped regularly.
The Foundation looked particularly at the apparent waning of grass roots traditional community self-help initiatives, and noted the tremendous social and economic challenges being faced daily, by vulnerable families, children and young people, including deadly gun and knife attacks among our children, increased recidivism, low academic and skills achievements, mental health and other health challenges, and low take up in business initiatives. The rejuvenated and flourishing supplementary schools movement was examined.
Gaps, requiring a fresh approach to ‘grassroots partnerships’ were identified. It was recommended that a network was needed to provide members with confidence and greater measure of community independence, to generate creativity and innovations in their work.
The type of platform that will enable members to facilitate swift and helpful cooperation and communications, to focus on strengths and weaknesses, and positioning them to benefit from existing opportunities and manage potential risks. A network which gets its dynamism and growth from the base.
The Foundation and Associates concluded that there was a need for a Network of Partners whose mutual aims are to help create the conditions of trust, a culture of caring and sharing, in the interest of sustainable community development that meets the needs of the local community, where partners pooled resources for better management, efficient service delivery, best practice, avoidance of unnecessary service duplications, capacity building, and, for mutual benefits, present a collective voice to central government, local authorities, funders, policy makers and others as required. And so, we set about satisfying that need.
Intended Partnerships will not emphasise ‘race’, ‘skin colour’ or ‘ethnicity’; but ‘innovation, transparency and needs reduction’. The ‘Self-Help Partnership’ will have had no inevitable alliance to the ‘black and minority ethnic block’, regarding any presumed historical philosophical thrust. Such Partnerships intend to recognise and embrace universal harmony and balance, justice and order, truth and reciprocity, a non-sectarian path in search of ‘collective’ societal solutions to existing problems which are generating so-called ‘Underclass’ and excessive social self-indulgences in Britain.
The Trustees’ completed re-structuring resulted in the Foundation’s development of individual specialised support models, based on the delegation of responsibilities, in the processes of managing the Charity’s service delivery objectives, and co-ordinated by the Foundation’s Main Management Administrative and Support Services (CMASS), with an emphasis on needs reductions in the following crucial areas – support for vulnerable families, children and young people; and support for building Self-Help Partnerships, among the voluntary and community sector, small and medium sized businesses, new initiatives and others, via Memorandum of Understandings based locally, regionally, nationally and elsewhere as appropriate.
Trustees The Vince Hines Foundation E-mail: cmass@ubol.com 4 November 2008
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