Reaping the benefits of new heritage infrastructure

An Early Statement on My Thesis

OPPORTUNITIES
Major Achievements of South Asian Communities should not detract from huge potential for community action:


The development of vast number of community assets has generated capacity and huge possibilities for undertaking community and public services for the local authorities in which temples are mosques are based. The first part of my thesis aims to distinguish between three types of activities undertaken at these sites and also the skills that are needed in each case. This early projection of my analysis suggests that the results are not uniformly distributed.


SCOPE
The three major strands of activities that are undertaken at community and religious sites are:


a) Planning, delivery and management of religious programmes; programming of religious events- weddings, religious anniversaries, deaths, naming ceremonies and so on. This is a core area and requires cultural background and knowledge of religious protocol and ceremonies. Consequently, only people specific backgrounds may undertake these roles and fulfil responsibility for the ‘pastoral’ needs of the communities.

b) There are many small scale ‘forays’ into action for community support and occasional projects to develop outreach into local groups:, e.g. collections for service clubs, e.g. the Lions Club does attract sponsorship and support from temples, collections to pay for natural disasters. Many temples run internal programmes for members, especially women, people with disabilities and elderly but very little is known about their aims and objectives and more importantly how these initiatives are evaluated. There may also be a tendency to accept less as enough.

One of the most significant areas of action in many minority communities is the provision of secure, warm and well lit community space for the elderly. However, in the main there is little evidence of structured planning. People come in a voluntary basis to for a ‘chat and chai’ and while this does serve the needs for many people who need company and access to friends, the lack of formal provision when it is possible. The fact that most of these informal friendship groups are based in places of religious worship may also deter other people from coming in. Informal groups of elderly people could well be tapped to provide access to larger networks in the community. The use of discrete interventions to offer help for some of the prevailing concerns could also provide better benefits than just offering space. For example there is a concern that many elderly people are depressed and may have health conditions which could benefit from early intervention. There is a need to take in wider views on this issue and to attempt to build a reliable consensus.

 c) The scope for providing structured, possibly large scale projects aimed at community development and the delivery of services to community need to be taken on board.


Major opportunities are certainly being missed and urgent and concerted action is much needed. However, it is felt that many of these responsibilities may not be well served by religious leadership or priests from non-Western backgrounds. More significantly, community action needs professional skills.

What can be done to use community assets which are underutilised during the weekdays? Apart from religious space the sanctity of which must be certainly protected, there will be hundreds of rooms, community halls, offices and also open spaces which could be put into effective use for the benefit of the communities that own them. I reiterate that there is no suggestion of sharing ‘religious facilities’ with people from other faiths and diverse backgrounds.

Local authorities need to work with community organisations and to assess the potential for joint ventures. Costs and benefits need to be shared. However, to make joint ventures sustainable, South Asian communities need to recruit professional support in the form fulltime staff on pay and volunteers to sustain the administrative functions.

PUBLIC SPENDING CUTS WILL AFFECT EVERYONE
As public spending cuts take shape and services are curtailed, is there not a logical role for community organisations to fill the gaps in provision or even to start new services? There are key issues here about dealing with expectations and mindsets which militate against community-led provision of some services, starting with the following:
• Local authorities have always provided certain services. This cannot change.
• The community does not have the expertise

• The community does not have the resources

• Members of the community will not welcome this role; it’s the role of the authorities.

• Why should community organisations be required to provide services anyway? Their members pay their taxes and contributions to the state; it is their entitlement.

CALL FOR ACTION
There is no evidence that community organisations have started to consider these options and whether a few may even respond. Instead of offering services on short-term contracts, they need to become comprehensive service providers in their own right but always working within the policy priorities of the local authorities or other commissioning agencies. How is this going to be done?  A number of proposals will be discussed here and the scope for tangible action will also be considered. Proposals will be put forward and hopefully, new joint ventures will be formed to service critical needs.

There is idle capacity in the temples and mosques. The religious programmes of each community need to remain under the control of existing leaders. However, professional management teams need to be brought in the tackle the community development agenda. Even more pertinent is the need for Asian community organisations to work as Third Sector voluntary organisations and to share the workload, capacity and perhaps even a proportion of the costs to meet the needs for specialist provision in the community.

The next step lies in the formation of new Asian professional services organisations to compete in the mainstream market for public services and to use their underutilised physical capacity to gain competitive advantage. Many key premises remain underutilised. It does not make economic and business sense when public spending cutbacks will restrict the supply of premises for essential work programmes to benefit local communities through strategic transformational action.