This is a CTP of initiative: Fair Shares (UK)
Time for Childcare was a Fair Shares project, supported for its first three years (2001-2004) by the Phoenix Fund.
It used an innovative approach to organise childcare as a mutual support activity among networks of single-parents. Some single parents undertook training and transformed their informal childcare activities into more formal businesses. Other single parents, thereby liberated, were able to undertake training courses and educational programs or to develop their own entrepreneurial activities. The project offered competence development programmes for the parents: childcare training programmes for parents undertaking childcare and a wider programme of educational, vocational, and entrepreneurship courses for those whose child or children were being looked after. The project provided alternatives to conventional childcare arrangements organized around cash payments. Instead, a civil society organization, Fair Shares, made access to childcare more available and, thereby, also access to education and economic opportunities for their parents more accessible and inclusive. It represented a new way of organizing childcare using time credits.
Fair Shares applied the timebanking approach of people providing services to one another to enable parents (mostly young women) who could not afford to pay for childcare to obtain childcare in return for time credits. The experimental approach was applied in two contrasting locations: rural Gloucestershire and inner-city Leicester.
Originally, the aim of the project was to help single parents transform their informal childcare activities into businesses. However, it soon became clear that some in the scheme were interested, also, in pursuing other entrepreneurial activities. The scope of the scheme was therefore widened. The project provided the breakthrough needed to liberate single parents on low incomes from being locked into staying at home and locked out of education and economic opportunities. It supported them in realising their educational and entrepreneurial potential.
The project also increased the rate of completion of training programs and educational courses because students were confident that someone would be looking after their children or collecting them from nursery or school. They also did not need to worry about cost. The higher course completion rate helped local training providers and made it possible to widen the range of courses available locally. In turn, providers of training encouraged those enrolling on courses to join the time bank because of the higher completion and qualification rates the time bank was able to support.
The success of the project strengthened confidence within the time bank that it was ‘on the right track’. It paved the way for many other mutual support projects to be developed within the time bank.
The project received financial support from the Phoenix Trust.
It was supported by local training providers, who also helped in recruiting new members to the TimeBank.
The project followed on from the earlier experiences of Fair Shares and emerged from the application of lessons learned earlier to comparable contexts and needs in other locations. These earlier projects and experiences include the first Fair Shares project on the Stonehouse Estate, Gloucester. This had also involved mutual aid among residents of a housing estate.
The Stonehouse Estate “has a lot of older people and a lot of single parents” and they are “a perfect match for each other; some older ones with a lifetime’s experience and some younger ones, physically stronger and more active, but needing help with childcare as single parents. You can put these together and that’s what sustains these things… they actually have real meaning in peoples’ everyday lives. They just know that it is a good thing, that they can call on people, and that there’ll be someone there when they need a bit of help.”
“What we did is put them together and showed how one had a lifetime of experiences bringing up children, whereas the other had spare energy and they could draw on each other. I always tell the story of an elderly Stonehouse resident. She was 86 and she'd been in the area a few months and didn't know anybody. She joined the timebank, folded leaflets for us and donated her guitar to the music group. We got local kids walking her dog [before she was paying £8 for that] and doing shopping for her. She phoned about 18 month after joining the TB and, wow, she said, I've never any birthday cards, but it’s my birthday today and I’ve got 15 birthday cards. That was the thing that just kept us going from then. For her sake, she knew there were 15 people around who cared enough to send her a card, but for us we knew this was working and that this will carry on, regardless of the timebank.”
“That was our objective. Just connecting people and let them take it on, and stay in control of their lives, and determine what they want to do. They then start determining what issues they care about enough to do something about rather than outside people saying what you should be worried about or do.”
Although the childcare project was not contested, Martin Simon argues that it was the kind of project where the typical reaction of agencies is that ‘you can’t do that; it won’t work’. He says that:
“Those with young families in North Leicester and the children are part of that whole idea that ‘it takes the whole village to raise a child’ but the catch phrase became also that ‘it takes a child to raise the village’. North Leicester is probably one of the more deprived areas in the country. On this particular estate we had, in the end, 42 women and men as single parents who went into training or into work, which is terrific, and all of the childcare was provided by other single parents on the estate. Every voice said this would be impossible, you can't do that.”
“The one thing we know is that groups of people do know about how to bring kids up. There are people who've done it themselves and done it under harder circumstances, but who also know the value of the extended family. They appreciate that we're replicating that.”
The experience of the Stonehouse project gave confidence over the childcare project even though most voices were gainsayers believing it could not (and would not) work.
The childcare project was set up in one way, but it quickly became apparent that the scope could be expanded. There was anticipation and planning before the project started, but also some adjustment to it on the basis of what was learned through practice.
There was learning-by-doing within the project that led to some fine-tuning and extension of the scope to include entrepreneurship activities alongside training in childcare and formal educational courses.
The lessons from the childcare project reinforced those from earlier experience at Stonehouse about the importance of local control and local self-organization.
All the talk is about “the negatives and needs and problems and deficiencies” whereas, actually, neighboring is an amazingly positive thing and it’s going on everywhere: it’s just hidden; it’s invisible.”
“If you take Stonehouse, the first ever TB, and one that's still going, it's never had a paid worker. It has a committee – they call it a kitchen table – of a dozen people. It [the Time Bank] never gets more than about 80-100 members, but it's on an estate, which has a lot of older people and a lot of single parents and they are a perfect match for each other. You put them together and what they do actually has real meaning in peoples’ ordinary everyday lives. That’s what sustains these things. “
The experience and learning from the childcare project has contributed to the overall learning that there is a need to stimulate connections among community members at the outset and that timebanking is good for that. Having created momentum, relationships are, for the most part, carried on.
“You need outside people, but I do truly believe that to address most of the issues that face us the community is the long-term answer. You need specialist interventions and sometimes you need a bit of help. But almost any issue you take you’ll always find somebody in the community who has already thought it through and come up with the answers. And you just connect people together, give encouragement, connect them to some resources they might need; but then you stand back and let THEM do it.”
“It has to come from people… because that’s the only way they'll stay involved. People have got to feel they're in control and people want small networks with people that they trust. Everybody wants that.”
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