Jake is the Chief Executive of Hackney CVS, trustee of NCVO, adviser to Sadiq Khan on serious youth violence and chair of the London CVS Directors Network.

Given you hold a senior role in your organisation, can you explain the motivation for what you do? 

Originally my career was as a medical student, so I’ve always had an interest in helping others and using whatever skills and aptitude I’ve got for partnership and social issues in a community context. 

I quickly realised I wasn’t too interested in being a doctor. I was more interested in changing society and I think when you’re working in a CVS you have the opportunity to change the course of history by ensuring communities have more of a voice, have more of a say in the delivery of services, are supported to be able to deliver more of what they deliver on the ground. We are all starting to appreciate the valuable role that the community sector has played so far in responding to the crisis, working alongside Councils and other public bodies. 

So it’s a hugely challenging job. I wouldn’t necessarily wish it on anyone. But the rewards are huge as well and I can sleep at night, you know. I sleep well. Although I don’t sleep much, I sleep really, really heavily and wake up feeling like the day is a new day. My commitment has never wavered because there’s something very rewarding in achieving small but also big gains in terms of the narrative of community development and how you turn that into reality. That is what drives me. I’m also interested in racial inequality. I’m interested in social justice. I’m interested in real equality in terms of the delivery of services and the role that the VCS so often plays to plug gaps in public services or in providing culturally specific support to our diverse communities. Throughout my twenty years in this game, so many times I’ve seen local authorities fail at something because they haven’t done it in partnership with the local community. 

What’s been your direct experience of Covid-19 – professionally and personally? 

I’ll talk about the personal bits first. We’ve had a few community members die, sadly. Brother Dougie being the most recent high profile person. He did a lot. He was part of one of our community programmes around black men’s health. He was one of those guys that was everywhere and was always putting on really helpful community events at weekends that allowed men to talk about their health. Men are generally more reluctant than women to come forward when they have health issues so it was really important that through Dougie we were able to provide spaces for men to talk about diabetes, mental health, all the sorts of pressure men are under at the minute – if you’re from a different ethnic minority, that type of disease is more prevalent. 

I think what I realised, and what society is catching up on really quickly, is that Covid is impacting on the poorest in society. There are obvious links between poverty and places of higher incidences of Covid related deaths. Society really needs to learn from this. I’m actually involved with a lot of work nationally with black and ethnic infrastructure organisations across the country. We’ve been meeting with the Lottery and government to try and make sure that money from government is reaching the parts that it needs to reach. I’ve introduced the idea of a substantial long term endowment that will focus on tackling inequality, and put black and ethnic minority organisations at the heart of the solution. So that could be a really positive outcome. I was talking to Dawn Austwick, the Lottery CEO, recently about this and I’ve managed, through my trustee role at NCVO, to elicit some support for the development of this. This is really new potential development hot off the press, which I think could have a really long standing legacy for our black and ethnic minority communities across the country. 

Professionally….? At Hackney CVS we’ve moved all of our services to an online offer of support to local groups. A lot of the work we’re doing in terms of programmes has segued into an online scenario. For instance, the work we do with young leaders, the leaders are supported and resourced by us to do lots of peer to peer engagement on the issues that matter to young people. So we’ve been helping young people work with the police on messaging around stop and search and managing community tensions. Young people are involved in an initiative called the Cool Down Cafe that helps young people talk to each other about mental health, so we’re going through the process of turning that into an online offer. Many of the organisations we fund through our Connect Hackney programme are now supporting older residents online, helping them feel less isolated. We are also keeping the older people’s magazine, Hackney Senior going too as many older people aren’t online and need information in printed form. We’re going to do the older people’s summit through Zoom, probably in July, so how do we get those older people with computers to connect? So there are some real practical challenges from Covid. 

In Hackney now a lot of the services are moving to a neighbourhood structure. So rather than them being delivered across the whole of Hackney, we’ve now got 8 neighbourhood areas that largely correlate with population sizes of between 20 – 50,000 residents. So there’s the idea of these multi-disciplinary teams – community midwifery, GPs, pharmacies – engaging in a local area with the local voluntary sector organisations. We started in one neighbourhood about 18 months ago doing intensive engagement work but with COVID we have now had to expand this to provide community conversations across all 8 neighbourhood areas – so it’s been quite tasking to scale up quickly. What we’re doing is facilitating what we’re calling community conversations; so local councillors, health professionals, voluntary groups all talking about how they can work better in the local neighbourhood. Really pleased by that – what that’s done is it’s demonstrated to the system leaders – the heads of all the health agencies, councils – the value of the voluntary sector and how we can be fast moving and agile in terms of connecting people.

A lot of local organisations have been relying on us for support around their fundraising, their governance, their training. Again, we’re shifting that online. We’ve also got some corporate volunteers through the East London Business Alliance who can help local groups, particularly the smaller ones, write cohesive bids. There’s actually quite a lot of money around but because a lot of the groups are working on the support to residents, the idea of filling out an eight page funding application is not high on their agenda, yet they absolutely need the resource. 

One of the things that we’ve just got sign-off for is that we’ve convinced the CCG to put £300k into the sector through our Hackney Giving portal. That’s going to be available in the next 2 – 3 weeks. So that’s quite a significant investment by the CCG for one year projects led by local VCS organisations who are dealing with the crisis. 

The Lottery, who has £200m of govt investment to distribute, is really keen to receive proposals from organisations that are impacted by the crisis and also those that have lost income, which is really important because it’s not just about getting resources to those organisations who have to increase capacity or do more, there’s also a hell of lot of organisations that have had to close down face to face contact, so all that income has gone. Some are obviously in a really precarious position as a result of losing income and we are mindful of this going forward so we are working with the local Council to continually monitor the situation. The fact that government is saying to the Lottery one of the strands will be for those that have lost income is welcome news. 

There’s a lot going on with the black and ethnic minority voluntary sector. A survey done by colleagues of ours in Haringey, the Ubele Initiative, found that of the 150-odd organisations they surveyed, probably about 9/10 were at risk of closure in the next 12 months. Really, really scary horizon scanning going on there. 

Coming back to some of the local issues – the digital divide is one of the top 3 problems which plays out in many different ways. For example, if you’re a family on low income and can’t afford a computer, how are you going to help your kids learn at home? It’s near on impossible. If you’re an older person that’s never had a computer, and not really connected, how are you going to get public messaging? If you’re a young person who can’t afford to top up your mobile, you’re potentially being disconnected from society. So all these different layers of digital divide are very much live issues. The Council have started to coordinate thinking about this following all the feedback we have shared with them which is great. Another big issue is preventing the further spread of the disease and we are working closely with Public Health to get investment to local VCS organisations who can help with the implementation of the new test and trace system. Having community champions echoing key public safety messages will be key to the local dissemination

We are going to be working on a local recovery and resilience plan for the VCS which we want to develop in co-production with them and our public sector colleagues. We are just starting this process and it will take a range of meetings and conversations to get right.

Many people are talking about Covid-19 being a game changer for society. What do you understand ‘re-set’ to mean?

Practically, it’s a game changer. Staff welfare is absolutely top of my agenda. If we’re expecting staff to work very differently, work remotely, deliver all the work that we do normally but remotely, that’s a game changer in itself. 

I’m, as a CEO, probably doing 12 hour days. I would never have been able to do that in the past. It’s not sustainable either, I’m not advocating that everyone should do 12 hour days, of course not. But I’m not travelling to work for an hour and a half every day. So I’ve got extra hours to work on stuff, which means productivity has probably increased. We just had a management team meeting this morning, talking about if we have a phased return, we’re probably going to have staff that will want to stay working remotely because they find they’re being a bit more productive. So that will change the whole nature of the work environment. So I think things like that are game changers. 

I think the fact that Covid has illustrated society’s inequalities is a game changer strategically. It means that previously when, particularly, black and ethnic minorities have felt on the margins, I can see them coming closer to the centre and saying – ‘we want to be part of the solution going forward, we need the investment, we’ve been underinvested in for years, now is the time to properly invest for the future.’ I think there are new relationships forming between voluntary organisations and between voluntary organisations and the state that perhaps weren’t there. So that is a positive. 

So I think on many levels this whole crisis is a game changer.

What do you think has to change? From a political, economic, technological, institutional and behavioural perspective, for example?

If you’re talking about Hackney CVS, a lot of our challenges have been technical. Moving to a remote system has really shown how weak our server capacity is, for instance, and our broadband capacity. If you have more than one person using Zoom, the system just grinds to a halt! We’re in conversation with our trustees about investment so that we can move to Google or Microsoft Teams, and a new database to improve how data is shared. 

For us a lot of it is about investing in the infrastructure to enable us to be more agile. 

As a community centre – so the centre in Dalston is the old CLR James Library. It’s not the most modern building but we’ve invested in it – £250k in a new heating and cooling system and a cosmetic facelift. But as you can imagine, we can’t use it at the moment. We’ve got tenants who rely on us as well, so we’re negotiating a rent holiday with the local authority but I can’t see us returning quickly to being a fully utilised centre that’s open to the public until govt guidance changes. We’re talking about the staff coming back, phasing in, making sure we’ve got enough space, using our conference rooms for desk space to make sure people can keep enough distance from each other. We will be providing webinars about this for local VCS organisations in the same boat as us

As infrastructure organisations we have often been overlooked in the past as what we do is not easy to quantify or understand immediately. The crisis has really demonstrated the important role that we play. Interestingly, a number of funders and institutions are starting to consider the need for long term investment in infrastructure. What’s also great is that funders are changing the way they invite applications – saying – ‘look, get your bids into us, tell us what you need’. It’s a different style of conversation and I think largely funders and councils are being supportive and are elevating the status and importance of the sector. For me it’s an opportune time for us to say – ‘look, you need us now so put the proper investment in, talk to us as equals, have us round the table, don’t bring us in at the last stage of your planning considerations, have us in from the outset, we appreciate your challenges but we know where the pinch points are, the crunch points, the bits of the system that aren’t working’. So it’s those sorts of conversations. We’ve just had confirmation in the last couple of weeks that the voluntary sector will be a specific workstream within City and Hackney’s Health and Social Care Transformation programme. That will give us more gravitas strategically. Investment in the sector will hopefully follow.

Thanks Jake.