The Big Society innitiative has a big potential

Our past and current work of with grassroots based organisations, services and community initiatives have led us to realise that those organisations and their community-based services are the faceless pillars of the grassroots community and the unspoken backbones of the British societies.

They are faceless pillars of their community because through their actions, with limited means, limited or no publicity, limited support they achieve important social impacts and outcomes in addressing their various social based needs

They are the backbones of our society because their local actions and achievements contribute to the overall society growth, reduce the pressure to their local public services and contribute to the saving a lot of public money which would be spent in public services if those organisations had not tackled their local social issues through their community-based actions

We found out that those organisations are led by a member of communities who is driven by the strong willing to contribute to their community, neighborhood and make a difference in addressing identified social issues. Their passions of addressing those issues inspire them to develop various community-based services with innovative delivery methods to address identified social needs.

The Big Society idea presented by the coalition government brought me in my mind all those small community-based organisations and social enterprises we have seen in the last 18 months which; in our point of view have achieved most of the social impact than most of the local public services through their effective grassroots actions.

In Tower Hamlets alone we reckon that local grassroots-based services have not only contributed to the improvement of health well being of local disadvantaged communities, but their actions have also saved approximately 10% to 20% that local PCT would have spent without those actions.

The issue of the coalition government Big society is how practically the Big Society bank is going to operate. Community-based organisations and social enterprise needless bureaucracy in applying for grants from the proposed Big Society Bank which should be localised than nationalised in order to focus effectively to local needs.

Beneficiaries of the Big Society Bank ought to have flexible and straightforward social impact measurement methods so that their community-based actions can be weighted. On additional to that a portal of grassroots actions and good practices learned at the community level service delivery should be established by the Big Idea monitors or manager to facilitate learning enhance and dissemination of good practices. This is important because there are some good ideas, which became successful and could be replicated somewhere else.

The Big society primarily conditions to work and succeed is the motivation behind its creators. If the motivation is a ‘’ways to cut public sector spending and dump all social issues to civil society or voluntary organisations’’ it will fail badly.

If the motivation idea behind the Big Society idea is ‘’the trust and confidence in communities to take care of their issues effectively through their community-based actions driven by their sense of responsibility and citizenship’’ it will succeed.

The success of the Big Society would eventually lead to a substantial reduction of public money and the reduction of employment within public sectors. This should not normally be a problem as the main aims of the government is to improve the quality of lives populations which would be achieved through Big Society related actions. The government should resolve the issue of unemployment that could be rise as a result of the public sector cuts by becoming innovative in looking at other ways of creating jobs in other growing sectors.

Let us watch careful and scrutinise deeply decisions and steps that the coalition government will undertake in implementing the Big Society idea because they will determinate and unveil to us the reality and motivation behind its creation, thus ultimate achievement: Failure or Success. I like to be an optimist and think the latter.