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A THREAD ON THE STATE OF CHARITIES WHO PROVIDE SUPPORT SERVICES TO YOUNG PEOPLE UNDER AUSTERITY
I was meant to be giving this talk at #britsoc2020 this year @britsoci!
We& #39;ll be talking about what existing under austerity is like and what its legacies might be.
I was meant to be giving this talk at #britsoc2020 this year @britsoci!
We& #39;ll be talking about what existing under austerity is like and what its legacies might be.
The presentation was called "Bruises or scars? Justification practices and the legacies of austerity". I& #39;m not sure what I think of the title anymore, but I& #39;ll give you a brief run down in this thread 
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@britsoci #britsoc2020
@britsoci #britsoc2020
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One of the most significant areas of both funding cuts and policy changes as a result of austerity was youth services. Services to support young people saw a greater reduction than other services more generally, but they also saw a change in how that funding was distributed. 2/?
In 2011, the House of Commons Education Committee called for an introduction of a "common measurement framework" by which the value for money of all youth services could be measured. There was also a removal of ringfenced budgets for local authorities, meaning... 3/?
Individual services could no longer guarantee income - everyone would be competing against each other, and the policy priority at the time was for early years intervention. 4/?
Budgets were cut, priorities were changed - we all know what & #39;happened& #39; because of austerity. And in the place of public services, charitable organizations or other forms of socially oriented organizations came to try and & #39;fill the gap& #39; left in service provision. 5/?
What does this & #39;filling the gap& #39; do to these organizations? How do they squeeze themselves in, force open spaces and try to keep a gradually disintegrating world stable? 6/?
The metaphor I would have used in this talk focuses on bodies, and the corporality of these changes (the conference theme was Reimagining the Social Body). We know that austerity was (is) a violent phenomena, but we don& #39;t necessarily explore the physicality of that pain. 7/?
My prior work has looked at what the student experience of marketisation in Higher Education is. Here, I was looking for a similar thing with the broader phenomena of austerity as my focus. What is the every day experience of austerity for these organizations... 8/?
and the young people they support? What are its sensations - what does it feel like, make us think, do, or have done to us? 9/?
This research draws on about two years of participant observation and participatory design with charities who provide support services to young people they consider & #39;vulnerable& #39; and the young people they support. Mostly this has been care-experienced young people. 10/?
(a quick note on vulnerability: the classification of & #39;vulnerability& #39; is an important marker for these organizations that I& #39;ll return to another time - probably in another presentation - but it& #39;s important to note that these orgs and funders of these orgs consider the... 11/?
young people they support to be vulnerable - this is no mark of whether these young people actually ARE vulnerable, or susceptible to greater harm. The label of & #39;vulnerable& #39; person is hugely stigmatizing, and we should move away from it. But as I say - these orgs... 12/?
consider these young people to be vulnerable and that& #39;s why this is important).
So how are these organizations and young people existing, at the tail-end of austerity, years after it started, when things have become deeply embedded? 13/?
So how are these organizations and young people existing, at the tail-end of austerity, years after it started, when things have become deeply embedded? 13/?
The clearest thing I found in my research was the centrality of "evaluation". Wherever I went, people were talking about how to evaluate the work they were doing and how to ensure any work they did could measure changes in a young person& #39;s "outcomes". 14/?
Evaluation can be a good thing - it can allow an org to be responsive, to understand what& #39;s going on, to celebrate successes, and to learn from mistakes. What I often found was much more tokenistic than this, and instead centered on "how to play the numbers game". 15/?
A critical question in evaluation is always "what& #39;s happening, and how do we know what& #39;s happening?". Yet what I found most often was a separation between managers, who believed in a need for evaluation, and frontline workers, who didn& #39;t have the skills or time to do it. 16/?
Trying to understand what to measure brings us to "outcomes". These are what a young person takes away from a project or intervention, and are typically measured numerically. A young person might move from a 3 to a 7 in self-awareness, or move from a 6 to a 4 in teamwork. 17/?
Importantly, changes in these outcomes are linked to the funding orgs receive. If an org can& #39;t show an increase in positive outcomes for young people, then they might be subject to sanctions from a funder, including limited access to further funding or resources. 18/?
One organization was obsessed with outcomes because they needed to be able to defend to their funders "why we& #39;re spending all that money". All of this measuring, keeping track and defending requires a lot of justification. 19/?
These justifications often look like accountability structures. It& #39;s telling the funder what you& #39;ve been doing. It& #39;s telling the funder this intervention does work, and that one doesn& #39;t. It& #39;s telling the local authority you& #39;re doing really good in this piece of work. 20/?
The problem is, the ability to make these justifications becomes central, and starts taking priority. If orgs can& #39;t deliver these justifications to their funders or partners, then they might suffer. So they might fudge the details a little. Tell white lies. 21/?
One worker told me how when they were new to their job, they were writing an evaluation for a funder and explained that they had moved a session from the location written in the funding bid to a different town, a few miles away. They were back and forth with... 22/?
