Voices blog

As government hands power over to its citizens urging them to take greater ownership of their local community, there has been little guidance available as to how young people can contribute.

As the ’Big Society’ is dependent on many factors, one key way to build ‘tomorrow’s citizens’ as recently put by  Tim Loughton, Junior Children‘s Minister, is that you “get more bang for your buck” when consulting with youth on their local communities.

This is a view that Giving Nation has voiced for the last six years as we‘ve been supporting secondary schools across the UK in contributing to their communities through volunteering, campaigning and social action projects. Thousands of young people have chosen to give their time, energy and voice through charitable giving to benefit others.

In developing employability skills such as  advocacy, team building, self-confidence, business and social understanding, our younger citizens are providing a positive impact to causes that matter to them. In aims of providing opportunities and empowerment of young people, the ‘Big Society’ encourages a spirit of volunteerism and deeper community engagement. The Giving Nation programme achieves these results by building active and social engaged citizens.

Using the social enterprise model, students from the ages of 11-16 are encouraged in their classrooms to build social action projects that provide a product or service for the benefit of their local community.

With a start-up fund of up to £450 per school, classes are tasked with developing a campaign and activity to raise awareness and money for their chosen charitable causes. With over 550 schools, 100 000 students engaged and £30 000 in school grants waiting to be claimed Giving Nation is continuing to grow and promote young people‘s contribution to a big society vision.

Want to get involved?

Giving Nation offers bespoke local authority and school training opportunities as well as direct delivery through assembly launches and school‘s competition judging.

Watch out for our new web launch on 3rd November which includes new resources and tools.

Visit  www.g-nation.org.uk or contact us at info@g-nation.org.uk for more information.

I was struck by the clear distinction between these two terms in the article by Zygmunt Bauman in the new Demos / V publication ‘An Anatomy of Youth’.

In his article ‘Belonging in the age of networks’ he differentiates the essence of these two terms. In short, he suggests that a community is more normally a group that you have membership of regardless of personal choice, and that you can’t easily drop out of… e.g. the locality that you grew up in, or your extended family etc. Such communities are often crucial in your identity-formation - often because you didn’t get the chance to avoid them: you were formed in the crucible of their personal and cultural forces whether you liked it or not. By contrast ‘networks’ are nearly always opted into for personal benefit of some sort. Their subject or identity appeals to you, and your choice to affiliate will more likely relate to your ‘chosen’ identity than the one that you developed like it or not.

So ‘social networks’ and ‘communities’ are not then synonymous. The former can be lightly entered into, tested, adopted to various degrees as suits you, and opted out of again. The choices remain your own, and by inference, their ability to ‘form’ you is slight as you can resist their force and take your avatar and mouse elsewhere if you don’t like the way it’s going.

By contrast ‘communities’ can’t be avoided. You have to stay with them, learn to negotiate and manage your way through them. Communities have politics where networks have cultures. I use those phrases carefully. Of course, communities have cultures as well as politics, but the words I want to stress here are ‘negotiate’ and ‘manage’. These two words are at the heart of politics. Politics is the activity of negotiating and managing the social order into the preferred version of members of an organised community (my definition). We need politics precisely because we can’t opt out. But we can opt out of networks.

What’s critical here is that we recognise the role of social networks in politics. They are not communities of the same order and they are not the place to learn politics through simply being a member. By contrast, school is. You can’t avoid school, and it is indeed a crucible of personal and social formation, not just a place of education.

Social networks can be a place for amplifying preferred choices into a consolidated force for action in the way that members choose. In this way they can be a great force for political intervention. But we shouldn’t revere then as an equivalent of ‘real’ communities. Young people in social networks are not learning politics by virtue of being members. Perhaps it’s time to be uncool and mention that…