CARESCO History - INTRODUCTION INTRODUCTION The Carers' Group were planning their Christmas lunch. "Why don't you bring the ones you care for?" said Kathy, the Organiser. "It's a nice idea" said Jane, "but my husband never goes out." A few days later the phone rang. "It's Jane. Can I bring my husband?" After the party, still decked in their paper hats, the women were washing up, and Kathy noticed a huddle of men sitting in the corner, gossiping happily. "We must do this again," she thought. "Funny how you start meeting one need and it leads to another!....." This illustrates the way CARESCO, (the Sawtry and District Care and Resource Organisation,) has grown and thrived over 14 years, helping people in a rural community in Cambridgeshire to support each other. Sawtry is not a chocolate box rural village, having rapidly grown as a commuter base, while the surrounding farms became increasingly mechanised. Its problems, however, are the same as those of any village :- distance from urban facilities and population too small to enable the statutory authorities to make cost- effective special provision. So anyone needing residential care is sent away to the town and immediately cut off from their family, friends and neighbours by ten miles of busy A1 dual- carriage road. The network of formal and informal support developed over time by CARESCO's members (- all of them, both givers and receivers - ) has supported many people in their own homes as part of a caring community. CARESCO in 1997 runs an impressive group of projects - Day Centres, Lunch Clubs, Community Printshop, Nearly New Clothing Exchange, Special Playscheme, Swimming Therapy and Information Point, - with the help of over 100 volunteers. It supports several other groups, including the Carers' Network, the Hunts Rural Transport Group and the Sawtry Tea Dances. Members are involved in Sawtry Parish Council's Health and Emergency Committee, the Community Health Council, the Joint Consultative Committee and Hunts Forum of Voluntary Organisations and Cambridgeshire ACRE. But the organisation "just growed" like Topsy, with many failures and false starts. Our foundation, in 1982, anticipated by 6 years the Griffiths Report on "Community Care - an Agenda for Action" in 1988 and the subsequent NHS and Community Care Act in 1990. In 1987 our local MP - John Major - was Keynote Speaker at a Conference - "Partners in Care - and in Planning". We had organised this with the Rural Community Council just as he was appointed Minister of State for Social Security. John Major spoke of the necessity to get Community Care right even if consultations took a long time. The Government was committed to the policy, recognising that it was more costly, because it served the client best. Practical steps had been taken to make use of the local knowledge and experience of volunteers. Representation as of right on Joint Consultative - 1 - CARESCO History - INTRODUCTION Councils was only a beginning. Following the recent Review of Primary Health Care, Norman Fowler (Minister for Health and Social Services,) had commissioned a Report by Sir Roy Griffiths which would be taken, together with the recent Audit Commission Report and a major Government review of client needs, to formulate effective services in the Community. John Major acknowledged how difficult communication is between statutory agencies and volunteers. Partners in Care - Conference Report. 1987. The Griffiths Report "Community Care - an Agenda for Action" aimed " to provide structure and resources to support the initiatives, the innovation and the commitment at local level and to allow them to flourish; to encourage the success stories in one area to become the commonplace of achievement everywhere else." CARESCO is a success story, and this account of its growth tries to show what circumstances contributed to that success. Communities everywhere are seeking for means to improve their quality of life, whether it is by setting up a support group for carers, or by working to achieve sustainable development at local level. The international initiative 'Agenda 21' is about empowering people to make changes:- changes in their own lives; changes in the aspirations they have for the society in which we live, and changes in the way decisions are made about the world we live in. Jones - Working in Parishes. p5.) Those who have offered help in the running of CARESCO have, through their involvement, developed the confidence to become involved also in real partnerships between those who are governed and those who govern, and their own lives have been enriched in the process. CARESCO's success story, told here, could enable other communities to think creatively and practically about how to make the best use of the resources on their doorstep, both human and material. Those of us in Sawtry who have, by sharing each others' trials and triumphs, become an extended family are convinced that there is no point in looking back sentimentally to a Dickensian village community. The A1 road may now have a first rate surface and motorway status, but Sawtry is still 10 miles from any town and it is both costly and inconvenient to reach amenities based in Huntingdon or Peterborough. We have been urged to set down the story of CARESCO, looking at our successes and mistakes and giving some pointers to how other rural communities might develop a similarly successful structure. We are not trained Social Workers, but a group of men and women with varying skills and experience, who have grown in confidence as our initiatives proved worth-while. When the Griffiths Report was finally published in 1988, we found that it suggested a new starting point - not the services that already existed - but the needs of individuals, like the husbands in our lead story. It outlined a framework which REQUIRED collaboration and action (as a condition for grants.) "It places responsibilty for care clearly within the local community, which can best determine where money should be spent. It will bolster experiment and innovation at local level by not being prescriptive about organisation." (p vii) Sawtry had already begun to shoulder this responsibility and to experiment and innovate. In the early 1980s Sawtry had faced the loss of some amenities which visionary individuals had begun to develop for the benefit of the village. We were able to mobilise community - 2 - CARESCO History - INTRODUCTION feeling in face of threatened loss and, supported by the Parish Council and the Village College, to form a local committee which enabled inexperienced volunteers to take on management roles they would not otherwise have contemplated. We found ourselves dealing with entrenched departments at Shire Hall in Cambridge. We tried, with the help of our enthusiastic County Councillor, Jean Willmer, to persuade these departments to talk to each other and enable us to cross their departmental barriers with our human problems. But we could only make progress by starting in our own community and reaching up for the precise forms of help we found we needed. We were fortunate that our school was a Village College, whose Warden and Headmaster believed that people should "turn naturally to the one public building of any size to be found in any community... The school is theirs. They paid for it through rates and taxes, and it costs very little more to open it for extended hours when the school is not in session. As long as what they want to do in it does not upset its main purpose - the children's education - then people's use of their school should be automatic, unquestioned and encouraged." (from an unpublished conference paper by the first Warden, Maurice Dybeck.) We were able to use the Adult Common Room for a Day Centre, the pool for swimming therapy, a redundant mobile classroom at the neighbouring Agricultural Education Centre for a Lunch Club and Office, while the Community Tutor helped us with organising training and with our payroll and database. At village level, individual social and health workers were immensely helpful both with advice and resources, realising the practical benefit to their clients of not having to travel over ten miles to services in the towns. Some were initially afraid that volunteers would be unreliable, but over the years a real partnership developed and they appreciated our knowledge of people in the community and the use we could make of the grape-vine and the parish pump! Our idea of running an Open University Course on 'Caring for Older People' for our volunteers was even taken up by Social Services for their own Care Assistants. The Local Authorities' Emergency Services had long realised that in most emergencies they would be dependent on a network of local knowledge and skills, and drew up their plans to take these into account. CARESCO's volunteers helped to distribute the European "Butter Mountain" in 1986, and in 1997 the "Emergency Plan for Sawtry" names many of the CARESCO staff as its "Team Leaders." "Community Care" is important not only financially, but socially, and every community has resources with which it can "look after its own". But the day of the "Lady Bountifuls" is over and we realise now that even those who are most diligent in helping others need help themselves - and not only at the end of their lives. If there is a "Lady of the Manor" she is likely to be in paid employment and someone else must take her place to help the members of the community identify their needs, talent-spot those with the appropriate skills, and learn what support is available from the statutory services. What follows will suggest that there are people who are perfectly capable, with appropriate training and support, of giving such leadership, though they themselves may be more surprised than anyone to find this happening. Especially in a rural community, however, it is a mistake to impose this pattern from District or County level. Any attempt to work top-down is doomed to failure. - 3 - CARESCO History - INTRODUCTION This History is not written primarily for academics or qualified social workers, but for ordinary citizens who, like the members of CARESCO, can discover and develop skills they never knew they had. The seven Themes are those which must be considered by anyone who wants to harness and enhance the resources of a community (rural or urban.) Themes One and Two deal with the essential foundations of any community development - the People and Institutions that are there already. Theme Three demonstrates how a small community can compensate for its inability to support specialist organisations (like CAB or Age Concern,) by linking together groups so that they can Share Resources and Support each other. Theme Four examines the importance of Buildings and shows how they also, given imagination and goodwill, can profitably be shared. Professional skills are essential. Theme Five describes the ways in which Volunteers and Professionals worked together in the development of CARESCO's projects. There is never enough Money to go round. Theme Six discusses possible sources of Funding, and criteria for successful approaches to them. Theme Seven considers the necessary Organisational Framework - and how to avoid bureaucracy! This is a Thematic, not a Chronological history. For those who want to check up on dates, there is a Calendar of the main events at the end of the book. - 4 -