Change within the community

Attorney General Dominic Grieve is a persuasive advocate for the Big Society. He's also a committed constituency MP with impressive levels of local engagement, as this Change Agent discovered at a meeting for local voluntary and community organisations last week.
The minister understands the risk that the public at large may well conflate the Big Society with spending cuts but argued that the concept of the Big Society has been around for a very long time and that there is nothing in Europe quite like the charitable system in this country.
He suggested that, as charities have become more reliant on the state for funding, they have become the dependent servants of government and consequently less willing or able to take risks.
Grieve believes that we now have a society where state dependency is the norm and in which people now look to the state for services which it is not particularly good at providing.
He suggests three immediate courses of action: decentralisation, re-empowering people to get involved in their communities, and reinvigorating what has always been there.
While we are sceptical as to how well the voluntary sector can survive the sudden and steep decline in state funding following the comprehensive spending review, we welcome the possible return of the sector to a greater level of independence from the state.
The underpinning ideas of the Big Society, as the Attorney General expresses them, are consistent with Change Agency's core belief that effective change is best generated within organisations rather than imposed from outside or above.
It's easy to see how communities can achieve more if liberated from the excessive levels of government control that they have experienced in recent years through over-regulation, zealous vetting and barring, and disproportionate health and safety requirements.
In our work, we often find that good people don't always deliver of their best because the corporate system to which they conform is limiting rather than expanding their ability to innovate. So perhaps even government is now buying into our idea that Change Comes From Within.