Re: [xmca] RE: The Social Creation of Inequality

[Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net>]

Ivan, a 5thD project continues, I think, in much the same sense that a 
personal identity continues: continually changing, but through 
overlapping memories and stories, continuity is assured in the form of 
continuously changing realisations of that identity, ... until it dies 
and can no longer tell its story. So I agree, a project is like a mind.

I think for people like yourself, Ivan, and Mike Cole, the task of 
leading a 5thD project is challenging, but it is something you know and 
love and is do-able. But launching a project today is like *flying a 
kite in a storm*. That line (of funding) which connects you to the 
ground and keeps you flying, is buffeted by uncontrolled and 
unpredictable forces far greater than you. If the line is broken by a 
particularly powerful gust, and the money to pay salaries and rent is 
lost, it must always seem like an accident, an act of God, so to speak. 
"Community," if it is to pay salaries and rent, etc., has to manifest in 
the form of definite institutions with budgets and funding sources and 
staff and rules, etc., and someone can leave or change their mind and 
Bingo! you're gone. And all the community will be able to do is hold a 
great farewell party for you.

I think it is worth mentioning that a project can secure on-going 
funding according to two basic models (excluding wholely owned projects 
of government or a business), basically private sector or public sector. 
There is a movement called "social entrepreneurs," with figures like 
Norman Tebbitt in Thatcher's UK, or Mark Latham, the renegade ALP leader 
in Oz, who advocate this approach. The intervention goes into an estate 
(what is called a housing project in the US) for example, and gathers 
together a group of residents to form into a company to tender for the 
maintenance contract for their own buildings, say. Generally, import 
substitution to start with and export later. It is a really fine, 
petit-bourgeois idea, because it is not only self-funding, and by 
earning people a living generates a feirce loyalty, but also 
community-building and independent of everyone. Tebbitt coined the motto 
"Get on your bike!" encouraging people made redundant by Thatcher's 
policies to invest their redundancy pay-outs to start a business. 
Problem is ... capitalism. It's not the perfectly fair market place it 
is supposed to be, and what invariably happens is that these brave souls 
get screwed in the market place by the established players, and end up 
broke and on the dole believing it is their own fault, rather than 
blaming the system. But you can see the idea. It is a way of avoiding 
the perils of public sector projects.

In Australia, and I suspect it is similar elsewhere, everything is on 
3-year projects, where people spend the 3rd of their 3 years, drafting 
up the funding proposal for the next 3-year grant, proving "outcomes" 
and "key indicators" and all this garbage which then dominates their 
lives at the expense of whatever they wanted to do. And at the end of 3 
years, if they are successful, and actually get something going in the 
community, and raise hopes and expectations, invariably, political 
fashions have changed, the funding is not renewed and the good citizens 
are dumped back in the muck they were just beginning to think they could 
escape from. So, the best projects have to aim to transform a community 
in 3 years so that changes are not reversed when funding is withdrawn as 
it more or less undoubtedly will be. But in reality, poverty and 
generation-long deprivation is not solved in 3 years.

So we need to get funding which will not bring about this awful end, 
which raises and then crashes hopes, but continues, OR, creates new 
conditions in a little while so that somehow or other, funding becomes 
unnecessary. But because in most civilised countries, health, education 
and security are deemed to be public responsibilities, but frequently 
denied to large sections of the community, it is pretty nigh impossible 
to create projects in these areas which become self-funding. So it all 
depends on finding an institution which has a healthy prospect of 
lengevity, and someone within that institution to provide a line of 
funding. But, people change, fashions change, funding requirements for 
even the well-heeled funding institutions change. The essential point 
is, I think, how do you secure the real support of an institution into 
the indefinite future.

Apart from hand-to-hand fighting by the 5thD "dream-keeper" which can be 
guaranteed I am sure, I think you have to manage the institution through 
everyday life, that is, you have to embed the dream of your project in 
the language and attitudes of the whole community. Ivan, you have spoken 
about the active support you get from the community, but I guess I am 
saying that is still not enough. The dream, has to enter the language. 
For example, new universities are rarely created, generally only in very 
special times in history, but once established they usually last 
forever. They become institutionalised. They are after all 
"universities" and the part they play in the life of the country is 
inscribed in language and law. Apart from careful choice of funding 
institutions, and dogged protection of the commitment made by the 
funding institution year in year out, I think public popularisation of 
the idea is necessary. But I don't know. We are all thrashing in the 
dark here I think. But these are my thoughts.

Andy



Ivan Rosero wrote:
> "Continuity" in these scenarios is an interesting question, for what exactly is the thing that continuous?  This seems to me quite analogous to (or a definition of) mind --pulled along through the interaction/intersection of various moving, and frequently disjoint, "dreams" that touch down here and there in activity, and hold somehow (yet ever changing) over time.
>
> ivan

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