A Springboard Away From Dependency

Anne Foreman, Murray Hawtin, Kevin Ward

This paper describes Community Springboard, an innovative, participative approach to combating welfare dependency and exclusion, developed by Leeds Training and Enterprise Council in the United Kingdom. The initiative aims to invest in local community projects and networks to encourage and support the uninvolved long-term unemployed to take up job training and educational opportunities.

The key feature of the initiative is the structures it has created to enable communities to influence policy makers and resource holders, and thus contribute to policy development. The setting and rationale of the initiative are presented, then its aims and objectives are located within the context of current debates and theories on the welfare state and the decision-making processes of people dependent on welfare. Next the structures and implementation of Community Springboard are described, and the experiences of one project are presented as a case study.

Finally, the achievements and lessons learned from the initiative are assessed, highlighting the importance of working with excluded communities to enable their members to move away from welfare dependency, but stressing that a state beyond dependency can only be achieved once policy makers and resource holders, together with community organisations, are fully engaged in tackling this issue.