Local alliances for family a new quality of networking The general idea Dr. Jan Schröder Two main stakeholders take advantage from local alliances for family the families, naturally - and all those institutions engaged in local alliances. This is what you have to bear in mind when looking at the success-story of local alliances for family in Germany, which has been written since 2004. The nationwide initiative to establish and develop local alliances for family is not a mere social initiative driven by moral impetus. Just as well it is an economic initiative with an understanding of family-friendliness as crucial for economic development, especially taking the challenge of demographic change into account. And the focus on economy is growing even more within the last years. I ll report on this development later on. First let s have a quick glance at the start of the idea and the kernel of the idea itself: It is crucial for good family-life that local time- and infrastructures are family-friendly. Families need child-care when children s school holidays sum up to 13 weeks in the year and employers enjoy only six weeks. Families need secure ways to school. Families need assistance for elderly family members. Families need time to be together. Families enjoy hotels with a family-friendly attitude. And last but not least a family-friendly climate is crucial, making it normal to stay at home when a child is sick instead of working with a bad conscience. By looking at the local situation in detail it is immediately eye-catching that large number of institutions influences the family-friendliness of a township. Business companies and trade unions shape workplaces. Parental initiatives, welfare organizations, churches and local authorities are in charge of developing the landscape of child- and elder-care. Neighbourhoods keep an eye on the children playing in the street. Schools, kindergardens and public transport shape local time-structures. Museums, cinemas, sport associations and touristic attractions add to an intense and inspiring family life. In other word: it is impossible for a central government to create family-friendliness by regulation or simply by spending taxpayers money. The engagement of a large variety of local stakeholders is essential to create family-friendly communities and townships. The best form to organise this engagement is within local networks, local institutional networks. These combine creativity, institutional assertiveness and influence with the ability to communicate the importance of family-friendliness for local development. In networks one plus one equals four. Practical experience shows when youth welfare offices, business companies and the families themselves come together, a holiday programme for kids becomes reality much faster than in the case that every single institution works for itself. So: we know we need local actors. We know we need institutional networks to establish family-friendliness in a creative, coordinated and effective way. Finally: what makes such networks work? The creation of win-win situations is essential. Every institution engaged must see a benefit for itself. And this is the outcome for network engagement: commitment of employees grows when employers set up family-friendly work-places, communities and shops flourish when young families take up residence, sport associations attract new members when engaging within school programmes. It s a win-win situation in economical, sociological, political and what so ever manner. 1
The implementation in Germany facts and figures If all this happens in many places measurable influence may be seen even on the national level. What happened in German since Renate Schmidt our former family minister started the initiative Lokale Bündnisse für Familie in 2004? Some brief numbers concerning the size of the initiative give a first impression: 670 local alliances for family are active all over Germany 56.000.000 people live within the sphere of influence of at least one local alliance more than 13.000 mostly institutional stakeholders engage in local alliances, among them more than 5.000 enterprises churches engage in 60% of local alliances, welfare organizations in 68 % and economical stakeholders in 78% in 93 local alliances universities and colleges are active, in 113 we observe clinics and hospitals and finally labour agencies are engaged in 170 places. In 2010 an evaluation concerning the outcome and the internal structures of local alliances has been published (http://www.lokale-buendnisse-fuerfamilie.de/fileadmin/user_upload/lbff/service/download/allg_information_zur_initiaive_lokale _Buendnisse/Ausgewaehlte_Aspekte_der_Wirkung_Lokaler_Buendnisse_fuer_Familie.pdf). The mean number of stakeholders within a local alliance sums up to 38 coming from 30 in the year of its foundation. The biggest local alliance even grew from 357 stakeholders up to 511 stakeholders. A more detailed analysis shows: local alliances are attractive for all sorts of stakeholders. Engagement is growing independently of the societal origin family associations, public services, schools, agencies for economic promotion the engagement rate is growing in all sectors. The intensity of cooperation is rather constant over the years. Leaving away the normal drop from the first year to the second one, coordinators of local alliances report in 50% that the degree of cooperation is high, 40% describe it as being average. Summing up this information one can conclude: the overall number if local alliances is stable on a rather high level since about one and a half years. Increase takes place within the alliances. Development of the local alliances on the local area Though these numbers themselves are already impressive enough, the real issue is the qualitative development. Local alliances display more and more different forms of operation. Doing this they enhance their influence and enlarge the outcome in terms of familyfriendliness as location factor for business companies and life quality for families as well. For a better understanding it is worthwhile to take a deeper look into the self-concept of local alliances and their integration into the local community. Using two dimensions the following portfolio describes the different types of operation established by various local alliances for family. 2
Networks: Motors of innovation in different roles strategically active network operationally active network network being the place for joint action network being trigger for coordinated action Realizing projects and providing services this is how most local alliances for family start. They check the range of services aiming at families, identify gaps and create new projects using their own capacities. Internet services for families, child care during the evening hours or even throughout the night, family-friendly cycle-paths and many more projects are set up. All this is important, but the question has to be posed whether it is realistic to achieve a family-friendly society simply by adding the outcomes of good projects. In my opinion it ll become pretty tough following this path. So more advanced local alliances conquer the strategic field. Acting as identifier and shaper of topics they don t wait for gaps to show up and to be filled. They set up strategic roadmaps how to deal e.g. with the needs of single-parent families or how to enhance the workand family-life balance by changing local time-structures. Complete packages of measures are set up and realised this way in a combined effort of many stakeholders. But this is not the end to it. Why concentrate only on creating new projects and measures? Mostly this makes a lot of effort and new resources necessary. Why not change the existing code of practice? In this case the local alliance in not the place where new projects are created. It is the source of ideas for changing existing processes towards being more familyfriendly. Local alliances act as modellers of working processes. They trigger coordinated action. I d like to demonstrate this by illustrating a typical problem in the German labour market. A single mom is looking for a job. The labour agency offers her this job, asking her to organise childcare within two weeks. This is not compatible with the working schedule of the department responsible for the administration of places in kindergartens. Typically this authority distributes places twice a year and every in between demand for a place is rather difficult to handle. In the worst case our single mom doesn t get the job or even worse: anticipating the problems nobody even offers her the job within the labour agency. In more than 50 local alliances the youth and the labour bureaucracy nowadays work together intensively to change their working processes in a way that single moms (and dads) get bigger chances in the labour market. Following this path, family-friendliness becomes an economical factor indeed: for the family who gains in income, for the welfare state who pays less in social support and for the companies earning more money by engaging more employers. 3
And influence grows even more if local alliances not only change working processes but processes of strategic planning and transformation. In Falkensee for example the local alliance is responsible together with the local council for changing a town of 40.000 inhabitants from a dormitory town into a town with active family life and social bondages. In the city of Jena with roundabout 100.000 inhabitants the local alliance just organized a workshop titled Jena grows dealing with all the challenges involved with the quick growth of this Eastern German town. In this case the local alliance not only initialized the workshop it is also responsible for the follow-up, setting up a path for a sustainable and family-friendly growth of the town. One can clearly see: this is something different than creating projects. Alliances arriving at this level of influence clearly implement family-friendliness in huge steps. And by the way: completely new forms of local governance emerge with action- and outcome-oriented networks of local actors opening new ways of taking responsibility for their community. But looking into this in depth would be another report and there is still another qualitative development to be reported on. National developments Finally I d like to attract your attention to the regional and national level. Networks of alliances evolve on these action levels establishing a wide range of collaboration-patterns. Some of them but clearly the smaller part - are initialized by the national government: the German family ministry regularly establishes development partnerships, e.g. to find new ways to establish family-friendly local time structures. the German labour ministry set up a national program to enforce the collaboration of labour agencies and local alliances for family, mainly aiming at labour market integration of single-parents. On the level of federal states local alliances organise state-wide networks or alternatively several federal states have set up state-wide working committees of local alliances. All these structures are completely independent from the national government. For example a network of about 50 local alliances arose in Baden-Württemberg. Together with the associations of towns and counties this network developed and established a catalogue of criteria assisting townships to turnout to be a family-friendly township. On the regional as well as on the national level local alliances establish project and topicrelated partnerships with a large variety of actors: in the metropolitan region Mitteldeutschland, comprising eleven towns in three federal states, a strong working group dealing with family-friendliness as location factor was established. It has been supported by a lot of actors engaged within local alliances for family. One result: on one of the biggest German fairs dealing with regional development and real estate the Exporeal, the main claim of this region was vorsprung familien.leben.mitteldeutschland (advantage families. li(v)fe.mitteldeutschland) the federal state of Brandenburg just started a project dealing with the question how family-friendliness may become a strong location factor. Through a welcomenet spanned by the local alliance and the local investor-centre professionals moving to Frankfurt(Odra) are supported in settling down in the town. In a second place named Luckenwalde/Baruther Urstromtal the aim is to transform the whole food industry into a family-friendly industry working with the claim our products are regional, of high quality and we produce in a family-friendly manner. 4
So all together one may sum up: Following an initializing phase with strong support by the federal government the initiative nowadays takes a subsidiary path and develops itself into a poly-central network without central coordination. Within this network local alliances collaborate with many actors in a self-directed, independent and cross-sectoral way, implementing family-friendliness especially as an economical location factor. We are happy to contribute to this progress and surely learn something by looking at the independent and cross-sectoral way the agenzia provenciale per la famiglia, la natalità e le pollitiche giovanili in the autonomus province of Trento works. Finally let s have a glance at Europe. I am glad to report that the Province of Trento, the federal State of Brandenburg and the local alliances represented by their newly founded network Bündnisfamilie2.0 just decided to start a transnational project in order to implement family-friendliness as location factor in different industrial branches. Local alliances are going Europe. I remember two years ago in Bologna I was asked to answer the question Partnerships and alliances for family a project for Europe?. I gave a tentative yes then. Today I would like to stress this yes even more, since family-friendliness is becoming more and more important for economical development and on the other hand local alliances stabilize local democracies. Even more a network of alliances and family-friendly regions all over Europe would strengthen the team spirit within the EU. Ad this is what Europe clearly needs: modern forms of democracy, team spirit and more family-friendliness as economical and sociological factor. I d like to invite you all to take this path learning from the good experiences as well as from the faults we have made in Germany. And we are anxious to learn from you as well. 5
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