{"id":1908,"date":"2013-08-05T16:52:10","date_gmt":"2013-08-05T14:52:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/euroalter.local\/news\/transitioning-from-welfare-to-work\/"},"modified":"2020-03-03T12:17:38","modified_gmt":"2020-03-03T11:17:38","slug":"transitioning-from-welfare-to-work","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/euroalter.com\/fr\/transitioning-from-welfare-to-work\/","title":{"rendered":"TRANSITIONING FROM WELFARE TO WORK"},"content":{"rendered":"

Welcome to the second part of our interview with\u00a0<\/strong>Louise Winterburn (@create_tweets<\/a>), Policy Manager at\u00a0Locality<\/a>\u00a0\u2013 about the proposal they\u2019ve made \u2013 the\u00a0Community Allowance<\/a>. You can read the first part here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Do you think the\u00a0<\/strong>Community Allowance<\/a>\u00a0gives people a greater sense of responsibility around their community?<\/strong>\u00a0<\/span>

I think it\u2019s absolutely massive. If you ask people \u201cwhat do you think of the neighbourhood here?\u201d people always mention dog poo, litter and young people hanging out.\u00a0<\/span>

When you talk to young people, there\u2019s nothing here for us to do and feel sometimes people are getting at them because the only thing you can do is hang out.<\/span>

When you get involved in a community organisation, you have the chance to say who you are, you\u2019re a young person who\u2019s got their own ideas, experience and energy that they\u2019re bringing to the greater good of the community.\u00a0<\/strong><\/span>It means that people get to see you in a different light. That\u2019s really important for community organisations to give people an opportunity to come together.\u00a0<\/span>

I mentioned the example of people going to old people\u2019s homes to talk to them and to understand what that person needs. That might be the only visit that person has had in quite a long time.<\/span>\u00a0You get a massive boost when someone\u2019s told you their issues and you\u2019ve come back with some solutions. It reminds you of the skills that you do have.<\/strong><\/span>\u00a0I don\u2019t think there\u2019s anything more powerful.\u00a0<\/span>

Some people feel so excluded from society that even working for a community organisation that they\u2019ve probably never interacted with these, so it might not be a sufficient motivator. How would it motivate those people for whom community doesn\u2019t mean anything anymore?\u00a0<\/strong>
\n
All the examples I gave about personal motivators are reasons people may choose to volunteer. The other side of it, which was frustrating for us, with the benefits system, meant that if you said I want a job, we said we can create mini jobs but if the system changed.<\/span>

The motivator there is that we\u2019ve always argued that the benefits system should enable us to pay people. I don\u2019t know about you but money is a motivator. About creating jobs, the only way we can do that is through the\u00a0<\/span>Community Allowance<\/a>.\u00a0<\/span>

People would be better off because they would be taken these jobs and improving their financial situation. We would then support people to grow into these roles.<\/span>

Locality also trains community organisers which are there to organise the community to give it greater power. Do you think that the Community Allowance would, over time, help build greater power for the community?\u00a0<\/strong>
\n
Community organisers are very much about listening and talking to people and bringing people together to decide over time what they want to take forward. One of the issues we\u2019ve always had is that when you get people together, when you look at what the barriers are, the benefits system always comes up.\u00a0<\/span>

Many of us are trying to work round these issues and so a community allowance in whatever form gives more options. So if a community wanted to pay these jobs, the community allowance gives them another way of working.\u00a0<\/span>

In relation to the Work Programme which is a minefield for people working in the welfare arena and even more so for people that have to engage with this programme because they\u2019re unemployed. How does that change the game and does it improve the chances for the community allowance to become integrated into welfare reform policy?<\/strong>
\n
It completely is. We did quite a lot of work with welfare providers who wanted to do something like a community allowance within their placements. We do have members within Locality that have contracts with Work Programme providers. What we\u2019re finding is that prime contractors aren\u2019t always been passing people onto community and voluntary organisations. Others have found that they have had people coming through but not in the numbers they were expecting. Some have pulled out and some are still in there trying to make it work. For now, we\u2019ve stepped back from the programme.<\/span>