Portfolio careers and the Big Society

Today, I ditched the laptop for an excursion to take part in a seminar in London about the Big Society, David Cameron's flagship policy, which has received its fair share of media flack. The seminar, organised by the citizenship team at LSN, aimed to clarify the idea of the Big Society (which is based on Saul Alinsky's principles of community organising) and was an opportunity to discuss the links with citizenship education. It also got me thinking about how portfolio careers relate to this agenda too.

It was an interesting day for a portfolio careerist (I wasn't the only one of our kind there) because amidst all of these discussions and debates it occurred to me that the portfolio career lends itself quite well to the ideals of the Big Society. My portfolio career allows me to combine several different types of work with voluntary and community work (which at times does and doesn't involve what I would term real active citizenship i.e. more than just being a do-gooder and actually getting stuck in with making or resisting change). In no particular order, I do it for several reasons: I already have that sense of responsibility, inclination to participate and take action that both citizenship education and the Big Society want to foster; it enriches my life by putting me into contact with people and experiences I might not otherwise encounter; it pleases me to feel I am contributing to society by doing more than simply being 'economically active'. Plenty in that list of reasons is arguably quite selfish and I am very aware that it feels like a luxury to be able to do it. I can well understand the concerns of those who feel they would not have the time or feel that the Big Society agenda is just dressing up difficult spending decisions in the guise of citizen empowerment.

One of the discussions that took place was about the perception that it is often only middle class or professional people who get involved in their communities. Many members of the group recognised this stereotype but others challenged it; perceptions differed depending on where people lived. Certainly it seems that encouraging as many people as possible, from all walks of life, to participate in all number of ways is a noble cause if the government can overcome the hurdle of it all being perceived as a smoke screen for savage public spending cuts, and could also recognise that this is what citizenship educators have been doing for over a decade.

So where does this leave the portfolio careerist? Potentially, in an interesting position in any number of ways; not just because you'll be flavour of the month with the Prime Minister if you do a bit of voluntary work on the side but because the changes that will happen to the way public services are run will shift the type of work out there for portfolio careerists to pick up. As charities and community groups are encouraged to take over running public services, there will still be work of all kinds to be done and paid for. The purse might be tighter but the decision-makers will be different. Nothing stays the same forever and a bit of adversity usually brings out the best in people. I say look for and create the opportunities.