A graduation, an anniversary and more

Last month, we had my younger daughter’s graduation – a fantastic day celebrating her years of hard work at university.

Work-wise, I’ve been busy getting a new website ready for the Good Faith Partnership. We’ll see the results in early September. It’s been plenty of work, pulling together stories, images, stats and more.

This year also marks 10 years since the Good Faith Partnership started out in business, as a consultancy that aims to help create solutions to society’s most challenging problems, powered by unlikely relationships. Our tag line is: Innovation happens when we step outside our circles.

That means practical innovation, collaboration across difference, new combinations of expertise and shared ownership of solutions. It also means moving away from institutional silos, away from familiar thinking, sector boundaries and professional comfort zones.

This is all wording that my fantastic director of communications Myra Johnson has written, after working closely with the senior leadership team at Good Faith.

It’s this approach, to stepping outside our circles, that has led to the creation of The Warm Welcome Campaign – where more than 3.5 million people found places of connection and belonging last year. And the ChurchWorks Commission, which is helping churches and government work more closely together, recognising what each of them does for communities.

I’m putting together a 10-year anniversary report on some of the work that Good Faith has done which we’ll publish in September and I’ll be sure to report back.

In other news

Sky takeover of ITV’s broadcasting business. Agree with The Guardian’s Nils Pratley that it’s a sad day for ITV and those of us who laboriously documented the consolidation of ITV franchises in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the end times of the days when ITV franchises were a licence to print money.

Ofcom published its annual Media Nations report, showing that as many people (26%) turn to Netflix first as to the BBC (25%) first when they switch on their TVs. Although the rate of growth of streamers including Netflix has slowed, they’re still clearly first choice for a huge number of viewers.

I was going to end it there, then I thought I’d write something about Manchesterism and Margate.

I am indebted to the chief executive of Good Faith David Barclay, for pointing me to this piece about Andy Burnham and Manchesterism. It’s well worth 20 minutes of your time to read it but, in short, it argues that a core element of Manchesterism – one that has been mostly overlooked – is about progressive communitarianism.

This means both the devolution of power to local people and community organisations and really empowering local people to deliver the change they know their areas need. Seeing “public bodies engaging with community and voluntary sector organisations as ‘equal partners’ in social change”.

This rings many bells for us working on the Warm Welcome Campaign, a network of more than 6,000 community spaces run, often by volunteers, by people who really know their local area, know the problems it faces and who are prepared to do something to help alleviate those problems of loneliness, struggles with the cost of living and other crises that people face in their lives.

I’ve just visited Margate, and it was fascinating. It led me to think about how, why and when seaside towns declined in fortunes. I guess it was all tied up with the advent of cheap travel to the likes of Spain, meaning English holiday destinations’ trade more or less dried up in the 1970s and 1980s – and, as with mining communities, there was nothing else to fill the gap.

I admit I live in a bubble; I rarely even go into the centre of Salisbury which has its share of homelessness, and I never visit the poorest ward in the city, now that I’m not involved in performing arts activities which we took to the streets of Salisbury each year.

So, it was eye-opening to visit Margate and to see the mixed fortunes there – drug addicts cheek by jowl with gastro pubs. Gentrified Victorian houses right next door to run-down Victorian houses with their front gardens crammed with litter.

A lot is happening in Margate, from what I read. Tracey Emin is supporting artists in the area. We saw The Albion Rooms, which is a residential music studios. The old town buzzes with life and money. And people living in Margate will know best what the local issues are and have the best ideas about how to tackle them.

Which is why Andy Burnham’s devolution and progressive communitarianism is so important.

That’s it for this month. See you in September when, hopefully, it might have rained.