When did you first become aware of music?

This post also appears on the Brendan Lloyd & Me website and you should read it there if you like a bit of colour. Don’t forget to look at the fabulous works of art in the Gallery while you’re there either. In the meantime, back to the matter in hand ..

I listen to BBC Radio 6Music rather a lot and have recently been enjoying Sunday brunch alongside Matt Everitt’s ‘The First Time With …’.The first question to his guests is always ‘when did you first become aware of music?’ and that got me thinking. Just when did I first become aware of music?

Answering that is not as easy as it seems. There has always been a ‘muso nerdishness’ about me and if I’m not the one actually making it, some sort of music has always been tinkling away in the background somewhere, whatever I’m doing. I would love to think I came out screaming in tune, feeding off liquid vinyl through piano strings!

But where does that come from? At what point did I realise that music was basically in my make-up? Was it the point I discovered I liked listening to it, or was it the point I found I could create it?

I have always said that my life is a series of song titles and mix tapes. Because it is. I’m getting on a bit now, so it’s quite a long mix-tape (that I call it ‘mix-tape’ and not ‘playlist’ should have given that game away already!) and there is a story to every track. If someone wants to advance me some cash to write the book I will, but for now, here’s a sample:

There is a definite ‘pre-enlightenment’ era, otherwise known as the first 6½ years of my life, during which my tastes were heavily influenced by those around me. H.M.S Donovan was released just a few months after I was born and much played in our house. I have vivid memories of the ‘Pee Song’. But I remember actually singing it, so that would have been at least a year or two later. I’m good, but not that good!

My first gig was Pink Floyd at Knebworth. I was 4. All I remember is that dried grass in hair feeling you get from sleeping in a field. Apparently I did ‘get my groove on’ before falling asleep, but considerably more memorable was my second gig in November 1981: Madness supported by the Belle-Stars at the Southampton Gaumont. I was just about to turn 11.

But music ‘awareness’ kicked in long before that. For example, my record collection had started well before the gig-going. My Dad and his brother showered me with vinyl of various genres, I had everything from singles like ‘To Know Him is to Love Him’ (the Teddy Bears) to Buddy Holly’s debut album The “Chirping” Crickets so by the ripe old age of 8 was already annoying the neighbours with my record playing and singing along to rock and roll hits of the fifties.

The first real foray into a record shop though, with my own pennies, saw me start a habit that I continue to this day: one record at a time is never going to be enough. On that particular occasion, I wandered out with two singles: ‘Up the Junction’ (Squeeze) and ‘My Girl’ (Madness) and I have vivid memories of washing every one of my grandmother’s windows to earn enough to buy me The Specials, One Step Beyond and Absolutely a couple of years later, all in one go!

Nevertheless, memories of albums go back further than that. Saturdays at my Dad’s parents were a merry mash-up of cake baking, Prince’s fish paste (yuck!), canary tweets, Dickie Davies and the sound of David Bowie coming down the stairs. Not literally, sadly. Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars became such a seminal album for me, that I covered it as an English project of ‘contemporary poetry’ (!!) for school a few years later and it is still my number one by far. Well, today anyway.

But, if I’m really honest with myself, there is probably one event that turned the tide; the moment I took the influences around me and started on the road of developing my own tastes. And that is where Elvis comes in.

Early one muggy August morning in 1977, I strolled down to the newsagents to pick up my Dad’s paper and Embassy Number 10s, as was usual during the summer holidays. Clearly this was before parents worried about their 6 year-olds being snatched off the street, or I would never have been allowed this mini excursion into independence. But what my parents didn’t account for that particular morning was Mr. Presley’s bloated face jumping out at me from the front pages of every newspaper. I ran home faster than I’d ever ran before, (and sadly ever would again), to the look of sheer horror on my mother’s face as I launched into the living room and a torrent of expletives from my father, who was simply quite distressed that his normally brilliant eldest didn’t know who the fat man was. Picking up the strewn pages of his daily and trying to contain his momentary disappointment in his conspicuously uncultured daughter (he was convinced the Saturday Matinees I watched incessantly had included a season of Elvis films), Dad embarked on a crusade to educate me in everything music, there and then. It turned out to be the most miniature of crusades; being my father and therefore the god of all things cool in my eyes, it didn’t take him long to convince me that I had the most amazing journey of discovery ahead of me and as a result, I have been tunefully intoxicated ever since.

Although I already knew my crochets from my quavers, could strum a chord or two and ‘London’s Burning’ had had its descant recorder debut in our living room, it was the death of the King, that notably inspired my Dad to go out and buy a piano and teach me to read music properly. Without a doubt, this would change my life forever.

The piano in question was a second-hand one, probably several hands given the sound it made. Not only did the piano sound like cats dying, it was a cumbersome object that barely made it into the flat without killing someone. It made it out of there and further in and out of various houses over the years and while it has scraped the odd wall, blackened the odd toe and housed the odd mouse carcass left there by successive family cats, it remains my proverbial rock.

All through life’s tumultuous twists and turns, I have always been able to turn to the piano. Whatever love/hate relationships I’ve had with Bach, Chopin, Liszt and Beethoven and the various teachers trying to pull me back from my own ‘creative interpretation’ of the classics or the hell I went through before each exam, not to mention school performances and the look of disappointment on Mr Grand’s face after I took my Grade 8 and decided to leave my studies there, it was all worth it for the massive virtual hugs I have had from being able to open up a score and play.

Earlier this week I went into Chappell on Wardour Street to buy a new cable for my old Roland digital piano; just the smell of instruments and sound of piano keys (great that you can plug yourself into your own piano world these days!) made me want to run home and sit down for hours, rather than the 20 minutes snatched in the morning.

So maybe I’ve always been aware of music, maybe there was no epiphany, it just was. I know I can’t be the only musician that feels bereft without a tune playing somewhere or something to tap on and I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one who is convinced it would all end for me if I lost the ability to play. It has been like that for as long as I can remember. Of course, the original second-hand piano still exists. It might be old, warped, cracked and in serious need of refurbishment, but its perpetual stability throughout my life is what keeps me together. We are inextricably linked and without each other we would fall apart.

Making moves ..

Having now left the position of Director of Service Development at NCVYS, the time has come to put this blog to bed for a while.

It’s all still relevant though, so I hope people keep coming back to enjoy!

In the meantime, check out my new venture – a collective of initiatives and social businesses under the heading ‘Bonsai Bison’: www.bonsaibison.com

Social enterprise is the way forward – I promise you!

yeah CIC – why it makes sense

“Nearly every problem has been solved by someone, somewhere. The frustration is that we can’t seem to replicate (those solutions) anywhere else.” Bill Clinton

When I first saw this quote I thought it was a pretty good one. I still do and apparently I’m not alone. During a quick internet search, I found it turned up in just about every article / presentation / speech about social innovation, franchising, scaling up and even ‘adaptive blueprinting’.

So if Clinton’s quote is so widely used as an argument for replication, why does it appear that the social sector, or the youth sector in particular, has such an issue with it still? Am I being unfair? Is there really an issue or is the sector actually replicating services successfully and just not touting it as ‘adaptive blueprinting’ or ‘social franchising’ or anything else for that matter? Is the reality perhaps that organisations are just getting on with it?

I’d like to think that is the case; the sector certainly talks a lot about the benefits of sharing best practice, so surely the systematic distribution of best practice models would be the natural next step. This is where we started with yeah CIC – it seemed the logical thing for an organisation like NCVYS to introduce to the sector it has worked so closely with for so long.

We continue to stand by that logic, but I would be lying if I said its implementation hadn’t been a bit of an uphill struggle. In our experience there are still too many organisations trying to re-invent the wheel. So I have to ask, is this because needs in one area are so diversely different from those in another that the viability of replicating one model from one area to another simply doesn’t exist or does the sector suffer from too large an element of protectionism?

One thing is certain: public funding is drying up so the sector either needs to find ways of generating its own income or needs to get a lot more efficient if it wants to continue having a positive impact on the lives of young people. That does not have to mean starting from scratch with a heap of new ideas; if you and your target groups value what you have done up until now, then you’re already half way there.

Think about it: in science, be that social or the natural sciences, the mark of good quality and reliable research is that it can easily be replicated by someone else and still have the same outcome. So, if an organisation is delivering services to young people and can already demonstrate a positive impact on their lives in one area, then chances are the same can be done elsewhere. And as with science, the more something is replicated, the stronger it becomes.

If we go by that then, yeah CIC makes absolute sense: firstly, if you are an organisation looking to generate some extra income and have a proven delivery model then yeah can help you with the process of licensing or franchising it to others. yeah takes the hassle out of the business while you get on with the nuts and bolts of working with young people. Or flip that over: if you’re an organisation looking to work with young people and don’t know where to start, then there is a pretty high chance someone else is doing what you want to do and would be prepared to sell you a licence to their model, at the very least. Engaging yeah to broker that licence is a lot more cost-efficient than putting time and resources into developing something yourself. You also have the added assurance of knowing that a model that is proven to have worked somewhere else will already have gone through a process of quality control.

You can find out more about how yeah CIC can help you replicate by following us on Twitter @yeahCIC, Facebook or by going to the website.

‘Miss’-ed in the fight for gender equality

Back in February, the term ‘mademoiselle’ was finally abolished from French bureaucracy. Prime Minister Fillon also took the bold move of ordering the term ‘maiden name’ or the equally ridiculous ‘spouse’s name’ be replaced with ‘family name’.

Bravo.

And about time too.

Granted the French themselves have used ‘Madame’ as a neutral and default title for women for quite some time, unless speaking to a small child, or wanting to be particularly offensive, or about 105 years old.

I know from experience that the same is the case in Germany – ‘Frau’ is the neutral term for all women regardless of marital status. The only way official forms make the differentiation is to ask what other name you were born with, if that is relevant. They also, by the way, don’t have this irritating habit of assuming you’re happy to be referred to by your forename by a complete stranger, who clearly doesn’t know you well enough to realise you actually go by a different name … but that’s for another day…

It’s really very simple.

So why is it so hard to get ‘the establishment’ to get their heads around the idea here in the UK?

Let’s look at the term ‘maiden name’ and how we address women here:

‘Maiden name’ implies the name you have until some ‘takes your maidenhead’. Not to put too fine a point on it, but I’m sure I’m not the only woman who would have a bit of an issue with that. I know we still have a few medieval terms in the English language but that one takes the biscuit. What is wrong with just ‘name’ or if we have to be specific ‘family name’?

Beats me.

To be referred to as ‘Miss’ grates a lot of women I’ve spoken to about this. But I am rather horrified by the lack of campaigning going on against it. Do women really not care, or is it as the woman in the bank today said, she’d never really thought about it? Time we all did. Because most women I speak to are positively irritated/annoyed/right royally hacked off by being referred to as ‘Miss’. First off it implies you’re still a child – which contrary to popular belief is never flattering, it’s just plain condescending and frankly offensive. Worse still, if you go right back to the proper meaning, implies you still belong to your father. We still refer to daughters being ‘given away’ by their fathers during the (albeit more traditional) wedding ceremony. I mean, seriously?

Some women like to take their husbands names and use ‘Mrs’ and it is indeed a woman’s right to choose – I don’t dispute that. Some amalgamate their names when they marry, it’s a matter of choice and why shouldn’t it work both ways? It’s not always practical though and certainly it should never be assumed to be fact. I have several female friends who despite being happily married, balk at the idea of being ‘Mrs X’ instead of ‘Ms Y’ (‘Y’ being the name they were born with, as opposed to their husbands name ‘X’).

Until fairly recently, (and indeed some antiquated institutions of the country, such as my bank, still do) the term ‘Ms’ could only be used if you were divorced. That is rubbish. And again, like the other terms, is an indication of marital status. Many women now use, or at least try to use ‘Ms’ as a neutral term. For example, in the States, ‘Ms’ is the neutral default for adult women, unless that woman chooses otherwise – or so according to my American female friends.

Case or not, I would argue absolutely that is how it should be. After all we are supposed to have gender equality in this country, right?

Ok, so now go through the same process for terms used to address men. I promise it will be quick:

The term ‘Mr’ is used for all men, no questions, no definition of marital status. Neutral. By default.

See the point I’m making?

There are lots of women like me who are tired of having to define themselves by their marital status instead of automatically being referred to as ‘Ms’ by default. We really shouldn’t have to ask, let alone push for it. For quite a number of decades now, women have been able to live independently from their male counterparts and we certainly don’t belong to anyone but ourselves. Because it’s not just a question of equality or even feminism, it’s also about identity.

I find it really hard to understand why I have to argue that on a near enough daily basis.

This is 2012!!

Equal rights between men and women have come a long, long way. But. Until women are no longer required to define themselves according to the men in their lives and are by default referred to by the neutral ‘Ms’ in the same way men are referred to simply as ‘Mr’, gender equality will not exist in full. It’s really quite simple.

From Catalyst to Capital

Having been one of the lucky few invited to the launch of Big Society Capital (BSC) last week and given there has certainly been a good few more who have commented/blogged on it since, it seemed a good moment to reignite my own public musings. As I’m also leading the NCVYS work on social investment and social enterprise on behalf of Catalyst, now is as good a time as any.

Wednesday 4 April 2012 at the London Stock Exchange: that the launch took place there was somewhat telling in the first instance – as Jonathan Jenkins pointed out in one of a number of the day’s Twitter flurries, we were right opposite the #Occupy site. Added to that, the room was full of investment fund and civil servant types; voluntary sector representatives were somewhat thin on the ground, which considering charities and social enterprises were hailed as the ultimate beneficiaries of BSC (closely followed by ‘society’) I found a bit bizarre to say the least. Nevertheless, with my NCVYS hat on, I felt rather honoured and a touch flattered, it has to be said, clearly we’re doing something to get ourselves noticed at this level.

Subconsciously, I chose to turn up in shiny red Dr Martens and stick out like the proverbial sore and rather irritating thumb. Unfortunately for my subconscious, they did rather match the celebratory mood of the room though and I was massively upstaged by the arrival of the Prime Minister David Cameron. Sadly, he did little to quell the myth that charities and social enterprises will be able to just walk into BSC as they do their local bank and request a loan. Furthermore, while there was lots of rhetoric around social franchising and how BSC will provide the capital to expand through replication in particular, with plenty of ‘why’ BSC now exists, and how the ‘social sector’ (as the combined voluntary/third/social enterprise sectors were being referred to throughout the morning) can benefit from it, there was very little ‘how’ from the PM. As soon as he left, so did the mainstream media, which was a real shame, as later news reports went on to further perpetuate the ‘walk in off the street’ myth. Had they waited, they would have heard from the much better informed Chairman of BSC, Sir Ronald Cohen who spoke considerably more on how BSC would work through intermediaries to distribute funds to the sector.

Within minutes of getting back to the office I already had a call about who these intermediaries might be. And this is the big question now for sure. Sir Ronald Cohen talked of an estimated £20 million available to such intermediaries; one can only hope that the view from the ground isn’t lost and those pots aren’t sucked up by the major investment funds alone. Surely what an ‘intermediary’ should be is just as the name suggests: a middle person between the social investment arena and the social sector frontline organisations delivering ‘good’ to society. That is one of the reasons NCVYS feels well placed to provide such a service, both to Big Society Capital, if they’ll have us, and of course, to the youth sector, being that this is our primary area of expertise. Essentially this is what we’ve been developing on behalf of the Catalyst consortium and it was to BSC that we had originally thought to look to raise funds for our youth sector retailer – we don’t have those funds yet.

There has been a lot of criticism around BSC and the social investment debate already simmering beneath the surface of the voluntary sector has been brought to a mini boiling point since its launch. One thing has to be made clear – social investment is not the one and only answer, it’s just one of the many options that organisations can consider to ‘finance’ (or fund in ‘old’ terms) their work. Grant funding will and should still play and important part in funding innovative developmental work (e.g. Catalyst’s developmental work around social investment and social enterprise for the youth sector). It’s therefore important to make sure that these other options aren’t subsumed by the interest and excitement around social investment. I would therefore be wary of talk that implies trusts and foundations and traditional grant funders should go the whole way towards social investment models. Different financing/funding models suit different contexts and that applies to business as well as the voluntary sector so people shouldn’t let themselves be persuaded otherwise. For example, it isn’t always about bums on seats, the overwhelming priority for the charity sector is long-term social value. This is a) massively difficult to measure in financial terms and b) takes quite some time bear fruit. So when all the hype has died down and you, a VCS organisation are considering what funding model best suits your organisations and whether indeed that includes social investment, then don’t be afraid to say ‘it’s not for me’. A word of warning to investors too: a binary outcome metric, such as a young person getting a job, may well be the simple, clear-cut option, but this approach can be extremely misleading. If a project gets young people into work, ask yourselves how long that job is for, did it lead to anything, or was it just a case of someone signing a form and then turning that young person away? Would you as an investor really want to pay for that or would you be more interested in ensuring that young person has more long-term chances of finding the right job, sticking to it and being a productive and positive contributor to society? Do I really have to ask that question?

So while I welcome the launch of Big Society Capital, because it provides us with another option for financing, as well as the opportunity for those in the ‘social sector’ to show those bankers what happens in the real world (*slightly mischievous face*), I strongly believe there is still a lot of work to be done. Getting both sides of the proverbial coin to understand each other’s work for one, not to mention the ever-widening gap in revenue streams that also needs plugging. There’s a long way to go yet.

2011 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 1,200 times in 2011. If it were a cable car, it would take about 20 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

Apprenticeships – the sting in the tail

As the coalition look to ‘revive’ apprenticeships a rather worrying case has come to my attention and I’d like to share it with you for two reasons: firstly this is the nasty sting in the tail of hurried programmes – no-one has thought through the consequences of pushing these schemes out so quickly and the massively negative impact it is having on already disadvantaged families; secondly, if anyone can help, it would be much appreciated. Here goes:

Jake was at Chichester College studying A-levels in Physics, Chemistry and Biology until June 2011 having got nothing but As and A*s at GCSE in 2010. As he didn’t do as well as expected after his first year (results not received until this term) and having lost his EMA, which essentially paid for his travel to and from the college, he decided to take up an apprenticeship as advised by his college, which includes a Level 3 NVQ Diploma (2357) in Electrotechnical Technology. The course has already started and Jake has been for an induction day, but because of his excellent GCSE results in the core subjects, there was little point in signing him up until January 2012 as he does not have to complete the preliminary key skills. He is therefore attending his work placement 5 days per week at the moment. Come January, the college will sign him up as an ‘Advanced Apprentice’ and he will attend college one day per week while continuing with the practical placement.

This all sounds good so far, but there is a catch. Jake turned 18 last month; he still lives at home, not surprisingly, but comes from what could loosely be termed as a ‘disadvantaged family’. With one parent registered disabled and the other a full-time carer, the family are largely dependent on benefits. As a family of four, their income is a little over a thousand per month (so a long way off this £500 per week cap government are proposing for families on benefit); as a result of Jake taking up this apprenticeship the family are losing 25% of that income. Vince Cable I’d like to see you support your family on a little over £750 per month.

On the face of it, this seems to be a simple case of definition – is an apprenticeship ‘employment’ or ‘education’? If it is ‘employment’ then Jake should be on minimum wage and expecting the same rights as an employee. However, the minimum an employer can give an apprentice is £2.60 per hour – this is what Jake is getting along with no basic employee rights; this is also what Jake is expected to support his family on, because the powers that be consider his apprenticeship to be employment and as a result have slashed the benefits his parents receive.

Some of the losses have occurred because the family are no longer considered eligible for the ‘child elements’ for Jake, although they would have been had he stayed in traditional full-time education until the age of 20. The following have made cuts to their allowance on this basis as they consider Jake to now be earning a ‘wage’ and therefore contributing to the family income:

• Arun District Council with regards to their Council Tax
• The DWP with regards to the Carers Allowance his mother receives
• HMRC with regards to Child Benefit stopped 9 September 2011, which is the date they consider his full-time education to have stopped (though ironically, not when considering Tax Credits, see below)

The biggest loss however has come courtesy of the HMRC Tax Credits which have now been halved. Just to rub salt into that wound, the family have been told to actually pay back what they have received from the date of Jake’s last exam (6 June 2011) despite the fact that he had every intention of continuing his A levels until he received his results and went back to college in September. Isn’t this discriminatory? How can they possibly have known that he wouldn’t have got his predicted grades for A1? Worse still HMRC consider his apprenticeship to be employment, and the paltry amount he receives, a wage enough to support his family – this does not seem right at any level. Added to that, the fact that HMRC appear to consider the dates at which Jake ‘left full-time education’ at their discretion is frankly quite farcical especially when no-one owns a crystal ball.

The reason the HMRC give for no longer paying tax credits is because according to them, the government are no longer paying for Jake’s education. This is also a bit of a grey area it seems as the employer is actually getting the government incentive Cable and his cronies have been touting to take Jake on as an apprentice, so in actual fact, government are still paying for Jake’s education – interesting too that in this instance, HRMC used the word ‘education’.

Jake and his family feel penalised for his taking up this apprenticeship and quite rightly so. The college did not actually give him much choice – despite not failing A1 outright, they did not consider his grades to be good enough for A2. Had he stayed in traditional class-room education, he would have been entitled to whatever replacement EMA for ‘disadvantaged’ students government decided to introduce and keep his Saturday job without having to hand any cash over to his mother at the end of the month. Because he’s taken up an apprenticeship he essentially gets nothing because his ‘earnings’ are considered enough to compensate for the 25% loss of income his family have suffered as a result of him not continuing with his A-Levels, despite staying on and studying – ‘earnings’ which by the way are just 50p per hour more than I got in my Saturday job 25 years ago ..

Apparently the only people who have considered the actual level of Jake’s ‘earnings’ is the local council, for everyone else it seems to be a simple case of ‘he has a job therefore we cut benefits to the rest of the family’. The fact that it’s an apprenticeship and not a full-time job paid at minimum wage, appears to have been ignored by all concerned, which is just wrong.

Personally I feel that if an apprenticeship is offered as an alternative route to ‘traditional’ full-time education and given the minimum £2.60 per hour instead of the minimum wage and full employee rights, then it should still be classed as education of the vocational kind, and NOT employment.

Here is a lad who has done really well academically and is determined to carry on with training and gain his qualifications – he and his family would however be better off if he signed on at the job centre, how us that an incentive? Is this just a case of confusion over definition in one area of the country or are there others this has happened to? Please forward this and help ensure other families don’t have to suffer this kind of injustice.