Town halls and charitable funding bodies should promote community cohesion as a matter of course and only fund single ethnic groups if it can be proven that this is the best way to tackle social and economic problems.
Herpreet Kaur Grewal
Town halls and charitable funding bodies should promote community cohesion as a matter of course and only fund single ethnic groups if it can be proven that this is the best way to tackle social and economic problems, says government guidance.
Last year, the government-appointed Commission on Integration and Cohesion (CIC) recommended a ban on “single group funding”: the awarding of grants to third sector activities organised “on the basis of single identities” (R&R, 15 June 2007, p1).
The CIC said giving money to specialist groups, such as those that served particular ethnic groups, should be the “exception rather than the rule” to avoid potential divisiveness.
But communities secretary Hazel Blears said that it can sometimes be prudent to fund single ethnic groups.
Responding this week to the CIC’s recommendations, Blears said that funding decisions made by local authorities and other public bodies should not “aim to cancel projects working specifically with young black men to tackle gun crime, for example”, or with Muslim communities and women.
She said: “These projects can and should continue, and the good work of the third sector in approaching alienated and excluded parts of our communities should be recognised.”
Draft guidance published by the Government this week says that working with a single group is appropriate when a single group approach rather than a mainstream one seems the best way to tackle problems in that ethnic community. All groups can consider how they can “promote cohesion and integration”, it adds.
Blears told Regeneration & Renewal: “I’ve tried to be sensitive to the concerns (of third sector groups), but at the same time I really want to push forward and say that there ought to be a point where we try and bring people together. Simply reinforcing a separate identity is not in the interests of society as a whole.”
Kevin Curley, chief executive of umbrella body the National Association for Voluntary and Community Action, welcomed the guidance. He said that its tone and contents contrasted starkly with what the CIC had proposed, which had been “very threatening” for specialist third sector groups.
The Government is now consulting on the new guidance.
Cohesion Guidance for Funders is available via www.regen.net/doc.