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Community Development and Social Enterprise
“You’ve got to leave us to make our own mistakes,” a respected worker at Cwmbran Community Press told me shortly after I’d left my job as manager to advise other groups on setting up social enterprises. She had a very good point. I’d spent 14 years helping to build CCP into what we belìeved was Wales’ first sustainable community business, and now the people I was leaving behind needed to learn how to manage.
So I stopped telling them what they were doing wrong – and just over a year later our precious pioneering community company went bankrupt. The tally of mistakes included poor financial monitoring, ill-advised investment in new equipment and inadequate quality control.
The message from this desperately disappointing outcome was clear to me: some mistakes are just too big for workers with limited business experience.
Community enterprise is tough and when the necessary skills are in short supply we must create opportunities for staff and board members to learn from other people’s mistakes, not their own.
Almost all the training, support and guidance I’ve provided since then is based on what not to do and how to avoid doing it.
It’s not my primary intention to point out how wonderful Cwmbran Community Press was in the grim years of soaring unemployment and political upheaval in the 1970s and 1980s and how important it became. But some background may help to give credibility to our publications – which really are worth taking a look at. Click here to read more about CCP and our the consultancy services we went on to provide.
Key Publications Available
CPC produced a host of articles, booklets, training packs and guides over the years, and much of this material is still available if anyone is interested. The most important of these include:
- Faith and Hope Don’t Run Charities – Trustees Do* – a definitive guide on governance for community groups and charities, which ran to three extensively updated editions.
- It’s An Idea, But Is It A Business* – a detailed account of setting up, running and sustaining a small social enterprise organisation.
- The Sustainable Leadership Toolkit – Tools for checking out the taboo subject of leadership in community organisations: the long-term dangers of Chief executives with too much or too little power, and chairs of boards who have served beyond their sell-by date, based on original research funded by the Welsh Government. (The research report itself and ancillary materials can also be downloaded.)
*Both these guides were published by Wales Council For Voluntary Action, but you can also download them here.
Other material here includes information sheets on:
- Starting social enterprise
- Business planning
- Financial monitoring
- Constitutions and legal structures
- Trustee roles and responsibilities
Health warning: The main point of the guidance is help with how to do things, not necessarily what to do. So I haven’t attempted to update the information here with any recent changes in legislation or Charity Commission policies. If there is room for doubt about current requirements you should check relevant sites on line.
Lesson 1: stick to your schedules and deadlines
The Trains Don’t Stop Here Any More, a pictorial history of Cwmbran and the new town which I wrote with Village Publishing editor Jon Preece, was an early big seller for our publishing project. We had grant money to print it in-house before the end of our first year, but the research and writing were massively behind schedule. So to avoid losing all of the funding we decided to print the cover in advance of the text – our topical choice of title reflecting public frustration that all the new town’s railway stations had closed years ago. By the time The Trains Don’s Stop eventually reached the shops the local authorities and British Rail had finally decided to open a new station near the town centre, rendering our title entirely spurious!
A great double act: Dave Horton (Development Manager) and John Hallett (Director) at ACE – Action in Caerau and Ely. They started with an impossible vision of a permanent and sustainable regeneration organisation in Cardiff’s most deprived estates built on the Communities First Programme. I’ve worked with them for five years as an advisor and now as a trustee, and watched them turning this dream into a real prospect. It shows what can be achieved with good planning, high quality management, incomparable community development work and, I’d like to think, the capacity to listen to good advice. This is how everyone should be doing it.
- Community development
