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Entrepreneurial thinking will save services
Social entrepreneur Robert Ashton has written to Eric Pickles, the Community Secretary, imploring him to help charities to help themselves.
“Beating Councils up for cutting funding to voluntary and community services will only bruise them,” he wrote. “Why not demonstrate to charities how, with their support, their services can become self-sufficient within three years. That will embarrass them into helping you succeed in your aims.”
Mr Ashton’s wrote in response to a letter to the Times from 550 senior county councillors condemning local authorities for making disproportionate cuts to services offered by charities in order to save their own departments.
The Times letter argues that councils are storing up huge financial problems for the future by cutting support to the most vulnerable.
“In the work I do to encourage and support social organisations to become more entrepreneurial, I encourage them to see how negative it can look if their only response is to shout and scream,” writes Mr Ashton, who is trustee of the Norfolk Community Foundation and a director of Ethecol ethical credit-card processors.
“It is far more constructive to actually develop a business plan that shows how self sufficiency can be achieved, then invite the local authority concerned to help make that happen. My experience suggests that Councils are far more likely to respond favourably to a coherent business case, than a public kicking.”
The Community Secretary has threatened new regulations to force local authorities to support voluntary organisations.
Mr Aston goes on to outline how he helps voluntary organisations ‘see the wood for the trees’ and recognise the need for and importance of:
- Service development and collaborative alternatives – eg close the day centre and run groups in the pub next door that’s empty at lunchtime.
- Developing ‘private clients’ who can and will pay then invest the profits in supporting those who can’t.
- Mergers and acquisitions to eliminate duplication and benefit from economies of scale.
- Effectively and pragmatically assess the social return on investment to create the clarity and comfort agencies need if they are to invest.
His letter concludes: “Isn’t that what the Big Society is all about?”
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