I think for people like yourself, Ivan, and Mike Cole, the task of leading a 5thD project is challenging, but it is something you know and love and is do-able. But launching a project today is like *flying a kite in a storm*. That line (of funding) which connects you to the ground and keeps you flying, is buffeted by uncontrolled and unpredictable forces far greater than you. If the line is broken by a particularly powerful gust, and the money to pay salaries and rent is lost, it must always seem like an accident, an act of God, so to speak. "Community," if it is to pay salaries and rent, etc., has to manifest in the form of definite institutions with budgets and funding sources and staff and rules, etc., and someone can leave or change their mind and Bingo! you're gone. And all the community will be able to do is hold a great farewell party for you.
I think it is worth mentioning that a project can secure on-going funding according to two basic models (excluding wholely owned projects of government or a business), basically private sector or public sector. There is a movement called "social entrepreneurs," with figures like Norman Tebbitt in Thatcher's UK, or Mark Latham, the renegade ALP leader in Oz, who advocate this approach. The intervention goes into an estate (what is called a housing project in the US) for example, and gathers together a group of residents to form into a company to tender for the maintenance contract for their own buildings, say. Generally, import substitution to start with and export later. It is a really fine, petit-bourgeois idea, because it is not only self-funding, and by earning people a living generates a feirce loyalty, but also community-building and independent of everyone. Tebbitt coined the motto "Get on your bike!" encouraging people made redundant by Thatcher's policies to invest their redundancy pay-outs to start a business. Problem is ... capitalism. It's not the perfectly fair market place it is supposed to be, and what invariably happens is that these brave souls get screwed in the market place by the established players, and end up broke and on the dole believing it is their own fault, rather than blaming the system. But you can see the idea. It is a way of avoiding the perils of public sector projects.
In Australia, and I suspect it is similar elsewhere, everything is on 3-year projects, where people spend the 3rd of their 3 years, drafting up the funding proposal for the next 3-year grant, proving "outcomes" and "key indicators" and all this garbage which then dominates their lives at the expense of whatever they wanted to do. And at the end of 3 years, if they are successful, and actually get something going in the community, and raise hopes and expectations, invariably, political fashions have changed, the funding is not renewed and the good citizens are dumped back in the muck they were just beginning to think they could escape from. So, the best projects have to aim to transform a community in 3 years so that changes are not reversed when funding is withdrawn as it more or less undoubtedly will be. But in reality, poverty and generation-long deprivation is not solved in 3 years.
So we need to get funding which will not bring about this awful end, which raises and then crashes hopes, but continues, OR, creates new conditions in a little while so that somehow or other, funding becomes unnecessary. But because in most civilised countries, health, education and security are deemed to be public responsibilities, but frequently denied to large sections of the community, it is pretty nigh impossible to create projects in these areas which become self-funding. So it all depends on finding an institution which has a healthy prospect of lengevity, and someone within that institution to provide a line of funding. But, people change, fashions change, funding requirements for even the well-heeled funding institutions change. The essential point is, I think, how do you secure the real support of an institution into the indefinite future.
Apart from hand-to-hand fighting by the 5thD "dream-keeper" which can be guaranteed I am sure, I think you have to manage the institution through everyday life, that is, you have to embed the dream of your project in the language and attitudes of the whole community. Ivan, you have spoken about the active support you get from the community, but I guess I am saying that is still not enough. The dream, has to enter the language. For example, new universities are rarely created, generally only in very special times in history, but once established they usually last forever. They become institutionalised. They are after all "universities" and the part they play in the life of the country is inscribed in language and law. Apart from careful choice of funding institutions, and dogged protection of the commitment made by the funding institution year in year out, I think public popularisation of the idea is necessary. But I don't know. We are all thrashing in the dark here I think. But these are my thoughts.
Andy Ivan Rosero wrote:
"Continuity" in these scenarios is an interesting question, for what exactly is the thing that continuous? This seems to me quite analogous to (or a definition of) mind --pulled along through the interaction/intersection of various moving, and frequently disjoint, "dreams" that touch down here and there in activity, and hold somehow (yet ever changing) over time. ivan
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