This is a CTP of initiative: Spice (UK)
After Spice was established in 2008 it began to replicate its model of incentivised volunteering in Wales. In its first years of operation Spice adopted a very professional approach to developing, promoting and scaling its new model of time exchange, which focused on building political and economic support, developing marketing materials, reaching out to commissioners, and increasing its usefulness and attractiveness by connecting organisations within its network of earning and spending partners.
The Blaengarw project was hailed in Wales as a national success. The project was showcased by Spice and used to demonstrate the kinds of social impact that could be achieved. Policy briefs were developed to explain and illustrate the innovation. Increasingly, the Spice management team were able to gain policy maker and funding agency attention for time credits. The political context of the time helped here, with several things coming together to offer opportunity. The Big Society initiative in 2010 had increased policy interest across the UK in innovative approaches aimed at re-building community cohesion and empowering citizens and communities to become more self-sufficient and self-reliant in meeting their needs. Alternatives and new ways of organising were needed all the more in times of economic downturn and austerity. “Within that policy framework Spice was set very neatly.”
The context was therefore ripe for Spice to extend its operations from Wales and to seek to co-create and take up opportunities to secure funding for projects to develop and trail the Spice infrastructure also in England.
Spice won grant funding to organise demonstrations with English local authorities. In keeping with its professional and business-minded approach the grant money was used cleverly. A competition was organised for local authorities who could submit bids to become hosts of the demonstration projects. The competitions enabled Spice to win matching funds from each local authority. Furthermore, the competition increased local authority awareness of Spice and raised the profile and reputation of Spice across England. Once the four partner local authorities had been selected, Spice also approached other potential commissioners, such as health trusts, offering to include their interests in project design on the basis of their providing matching funds.
“The funding was used quite cleverly - we used grant funding as match funding. We could have taken the funding and just delivered the whole load of nice work in England, but what Becky and Tris did was take the money and say 'We've got some money, hey local authorities in England, would you like to apply to be part of this program and match the funding as part of that.’ That's what has led to Wiltshire, Lewisham, West Norfolk and the work in Lancashire. We got 12 applications, We selected four but because of that local authorities deemed it as quite a privilege to be part of Spice. It was kind of a competitive thing that was bringing in match funding to them and to their area and was part of this drive around Big Society. I think they liked the fact they would be getting a show case, there might be some ministerial visits. It felt quite high profile around that time.”
The first four big contracts with English local governments marked a breakthrough for Spice. Instead of setting up separate Spice offices in these areas, Spice developed new ways of organizing their operations by integrating their operatives within the local councils. These partnerships leveraged the reputation and legitimacy of Spice. The arrangements helped develop competence in working with local authorities.
The contracts, together with funding received for two other major projects won around the same time, an InterReg project looking at different community currencies and a project to establish time credits in Cardiff, marked a significant increase in the size of Spice as an organisation. Suddenly, from having a small budget and a small staff, funding from the grant and matching funds were available to expand the operation. This enabled new staff to be recruited and an office for Spice to be opened in London as well as in Cardiff.
The new local authority projects offered Spice opportunities to develop its competences in networking and partnering across a range of external organisations: policy makers at different political levels, government agencies at different levels of government, funding agencies, commissioners, social organisations and spend partners. It also created a need for new organizational sub-structures to facilitate the use of time credits in wider contexts and offered opportunities to develop these.
The rapid evolution of Spice and the form this evolution took were co-produced by actors both within and outside Spice. Within Spice, the co-founders and the CEO played important and complementary roles. Roles were played also by political actors, foundation actors, and local authority actors among others. Actors and their actions were coordinated and harmonised in the context of the new Big Society policy agenda, which created opportunities and helped shape responses. Spice emerged and further evolved in this context.
Becky Booth and Tris Dyson had been strategically preparing for expanding Spice operation on large scale and bringing Spice to England. “Tris and Becky had been wanting to scale into England and looking for opportunities to grow out of the work that had started in Blaengarw and Cardiff. Becky was the implementer and visionary. Tris was a particularly good networker. His role was to really get into policy, to go and present on it. “We still get occasions now where people will talk to us about a conference where they saw Tris present or a phone call that they had in the early days of Spice, even people we didn't know he'd been in contact with”
The Big Society policy agenda created a very positive context. It created opportunities for Spice. In this context, it was possible for Spice to get the attention of policy makers and foundations; e.g. “via the cabinet office and through NESTA, as part of this whole Big Society policy.” Ministerial visits to Spice and attention from big foundations, such as Esmée Fairbairn and the Young Foundation, drew additional attention to Spice.
This was important for securing grant funding, but using grant funding as match funding generated further opportunities. The tendering process was “great promotion for Spice”. Several local authorities applied for the Spice project tendering, which was a way for them also to have an opportunity to have trials in their area at a reduced cost, subsidised through the grant.
Spice evolved from the Wales Institute for Community Currencies (WICC) and was part of its legacy when the WICC project ended in 2008. The first time credit project established by the WICC in Blaengarw in 2006 provided the innovative breakthrough that paved the way for Spice both as a new form of time exchange involving time credits and as an organization established to develop and promote time credits.
The Big Society policy manifesto of the UK Conservative Party and the change of government in 2010, bringing in a coalition Conservative-Liberal government, created a facilitating policy context for Spice across the UK, not only in Wales, The Big Society agenda opened up avenues to politicians, funding, and new ways of working with establishment actors. It facilitated the rapid expansion and extension of Spice, but it also influenced how Spice evolved. For example, having won grant funding to establish Spice activities in a set of local authority areas in England, the Big Society Agenda was a shaping factor in designing delivery. In setting up the organizational infrastructure, Spice “took care this was aligned with the new policy goals of supporting and fostering communities”. This required a new way of organizing operations through local authorities, which in turn paved the way for closer and more integrated ways of working.
There was no contestation, internal or external, over the award of the grant or the establishment of the four contracts to set up time credit schemes within local authority areas in England. The sudden increase in funding and activity levels nevertheless created organizational challenges for Spice, which until then had operated as a very small organization and needed to develop and adjust its systems and capacities. The approach of inviting local authorities to tender to have a time credit scheme established in their areas clearly introduced an element of competition between local authorities, with some LA applicants losing out. Equally, the expansion of Spice into England where Spice would operate in some areas alongside existing time banks created some tensions. Although the models are different and distinct, one based on reciprocal service exchange among individual time bank members and the other based on group activities and incentivised or rewarded volunteering, the distinctions and the fact that the different forms can serve different and complementary purposes are not always clear for sponsors or commissioners.
This was a planned development that was part of the overall strategy to expand Spice operations including by extending Spice infrastructure into England. Nevertheless, expanding at this rate and on this scale at so early a stage of Spice operation was not anticipated. A big thrust was provided in the post-2010 context of Big Society politics. Without this political shift the development might not have been so rapid.
Several large projects coming within a short period of time was demanding and challenging for Spice as a small organization.
“They all came within literally [within] about three months of each other. So we went from four staff members and a low turnover to 20 staff members and a turnover in that year of close to £2 million. It was a really wild time. You know, we had to grow from an organization with all the internal processes that had sufficed before to one that suddenly had to have systems and processes that would work for 20+ people and having to open up an office in Cardiff and an office in London. So the growth was kind of stratospheric and quite challenging. We had a lot of fun.”
As Spice operations had been smaller projects up to the four contracts the organization had to grow and set up all necessary infrastructure very fast. This not only included hiring people and setting up offices in England for coordination purposes but also establishing internal measures to facilitate the use of Spice time credits on a larger scale.
“Well we learned a lot through those projects - a lot about how to manage time credits at that scale; what the accounting systems might need to be like; developing training that might work for community groups; developing training that might be quite specialist for public health staff; and developing all those tools and resources that would support the integration of time credits and make it feel like a valuable thing that would be a product that we could take to other people. So we developed, and as part of that, we developed a kind of training tool kit, we developed a lot of videos and animations, we did a lot of events which were in partnership with the local authority, got some ministerial visits and those kind of things.”
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