Today saw the launch of Lord Freud’s innovative initiative, delivered with CSV, called Grandmentoring. The concept involves identifying mentors, often those who are grandparenting age, to work on a long-term basis once a week with a young person not in employment, education or training, to help them find their way. Freud spoke very personally about how his own grandfather inspired this initiative through his example, and how often a mentor can make the difference between a young person being able to stick with a job, and being continually on benefits. One powerful example given during the launch was of a young girl who did not turn up to her work placement on a Friday, because her mother had for two years taken her out of school that day to go shopping with her, which had inadvertently conditioned her to think that you do not work on a Friday. The mentor assigned to this girl responded to calls from her employer wondering where she was, and twice physically turned up to convince her to go and explained that you do in fact work on a Friday. The girl has since then thrived and gone on to succeed in the company at which she trained.
The key insight of such a programme, which is now in pilot, is that as with National Citizen Service for Young people, there are many critical transitions in our lives (leaving school, retiring, leaving work, re-entering work, entering a relationship, having a child, exiting an addiction, leaving prison) when many of us encounter difficulty and face a period of being vulnerable. Having a process to go through with others, and mixing with others both mentors and peers who have different backgrounds but who have an understanding of what we are going through, can both benefit us, but also create within us a social consciousness that enables us to want to give back.
This in turn at scale could provide one of the answers to the question often posed, that not enough people will want to get involved in Big Society. Well, programmes such as Grandmentoring, and others, whether backed by the government or not, can help create new cohorts of people who have seen the benefit of being more socially active, and who feel a desire to give back which helps others but which also energises them.
What other projects and programmes are there in your experience which tap into this “transitions” opportunity, and how well do they mix people up from different backgrounds, whilst creating within them a desire to give back and serve the community?
Post by: Nat Wei
Tags: national citizen service, senior citizens, social mixing, transitions
There are really some interesting intergenerational projects going that are bringing together people across generations – the Centre for Intergenerational Practice is probably a good starting to find out more.
On the ‘transitions’ idea, the Pathways through Participation project is looking at some of this. The aim of the project is to explore people’s involvement in a range of different activities over the course of their lives. The researchers working on the project are currently interviewing people in three local areas about their stories of participation, looking amongst others things at the different factors that might have triggered their participation including the types of ‘transitions’ you mention in your post. This phase of the fieldwork has only just started, but already we are seeing how influential different life stages are to participation.
For information on how the project progresses, you may want to subscribe to the project’s newsletter on our website: http://pathwaysthroughparticipation.org.uk/
[...] support them in the pathway into adulthood. Nat Wei, the government adviser on the Big Society argues how the scheme, delivered with CSV, can help create new cohorts of people who have seen the benefit of [...]
Grandmentoring is an excellent initiative, it brings back memories of supportive grandparents, of indelible positive role models that have lasted a lifetime.
I believe many of today’s social problems are an accumulation of intergenerational deficits within education and families. To turn things around will require at least a generation. Tackling causes rather than the symptoms is the sensible option. I guess early intervention (0 to 3 years), to ensure secure attachment, empathy and social and emotional skills would require a cross party commitment of about 25 years. The next best intervention, 0 to 18, coaches decent parenting skills, underpinning 0 to 3 development in children – a virtuous cycle. Mentoring will help to fill the 0 to 18 gap until there is commitment to an earlier intervention.
Borrowing from my magistracy experience…I think a large number of young people who present at court- will benefit from being mentored by people from a very different background. Personally I think we read a lot into ’shared experience’ … that a drug dependent person can only relate in a meaningful way to a person who knows what it is like to be an addict. Based on facts from the University of Commonsense…i’d say that around 30% of drug related crime could be stopped by any mentor like figure …pointing out consequences in a timely manner. The grandmentoring approach takes us out of the ‘like to like’ approach to mentoring- which is neat!
Strange that I should read this today because the unemployed people of Marsh Farm estate in Luton are about to organise lobby of Nick Cleggs office in London to ask him to lift the recently announced freeze on funding for the final years NDC projects in Luton. We are about to begin delivery of a UK pilot of an exciting job creation project called The Organisation Workshop(OW. If the OW project funding is not released before mid August we will lose it altogether, and the spending review wont be complete till November.
The OW uses a learning process (similar to situated learning) called ‘capacitation’ which involves the placing of experienced mentors – ideally ‘grandmentors’ with time to commit – in support of a large group of unemployed young (and older) people, who will be setting up 7 new start up social enterprises on the estate. The enterprises will provide local access to a range of goods and services which residents currently buy from places outside of the community, as the service is simply not available on the estate.
2 of our local MPs (Kelvin Hopkins from Labour and Andrew Selous Conservatives)are supporting us in our efforts to regenerate our local economy. Andrew Selous has promised to meet with Lord Freud and Iain Duncan Smith to ask for their help to allow the project to go forward, as he believes it has wonderful prospects and is a good example of local unemployed people taking the initiative and creating jobs rather than wasting away on benefits.
The OW is funded by the New Deal for Communities programme which ends in April 2011 so the timing is super critical. We have to get clearance to start in August at the latest otherwise we will run over the programme time. I think I’ll contact CVS to explore the potential for partnership work as the Grandmentors scheme sounds like an ideal place to look for mentoring support, and we are hoping that Lord Freud recognises the opportunity to enhance the grandmentors programme by linking it to large numbers of ‘hard to reach’ residents who want to create our own jobs, improve our local economies and tackle social exclusion all at the same time
The Big Socitey look after your square mile could work well in stable and established neighbourhoods.
However in my experience the problem estates are those with transiant populations (i.e. students, short term rents etc).