At Transform we are faced with a range of challenges for our clients. So, supporing social change is what we’re about…

Quality of life

Recent research by the Audit Commission in to indicators to assess citizens’ quality of life or happiness suggests that people’s most pressing concerns are things like safety and security, etc. [2]

For those familiar with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs[3], these concerns, the concerns of many of the citizens of the fourth biggest economy in the world, are towards the bottom of this hierarchy.

We still don’t seem to be able to crack the basics. Public services such as education, health, housing, the justice system and transport are not up to the mark in the eyes of many. And certainly the enthusiasm successive governments have had for reform of all these areas suggest that they don’t think so either.

If our basic needs are not adequately met, our higher order needs must be taking a back seat!

Scale of the challenge

If ther Earth's population were 100:

• 6 people would possess 59% of the entire world’s wealth – and they would all be from the USA
• 80 would live in substandard housing
• 70 would be unable to read
• 50 would suffer from malnutrition
• 1 would be near death; 1 would be near birth
• 1 would have university or college education
• 1 would own a computer

Social change is possible

So this is the natural order of things perhaps?

Because problems are big, doesn’t necessarily mean they are not resolvable; it means they are hard to solve. Social, political, ecological and personal transformation is indeed complex; but it is also possible.

Social transformation means good thinking about the barriers to development; it means marshalling energies & awareness to create support; and it means practical action: trying stuff out. This is never pain free, but then neither is the status quo for most of the world.

Trying stuff out, practical action and pressuring authorities for change is what civil society does. And by civil society we can mean organised formal structures like voluntary & community organisations or international NGOs or we can mean a few people in a neighbourhood coming together to write letters to the local authorities to get improvements to services for the under-fives in their area.

Progressive social change can be fostered by governments and by private companies too. Public education systems have a huge impact on the children they educate and change the next generation of society. Legislative change at the European Union level on discrimination impacts on national legislation in each member state which affects us all. Age discrimination laws in the UK are an example of this. The impact of this on the employment of older people is already being felt.

Private companies increasingly appreciate their social as well as economic role and impact as the growth in social responsibility programmes in many companies shows.

But there is much learning still to do

In many cases, it’s not just the political will and organised pressure that can lead to progressive change. It’s also a question of skill. Public authorities and voluntary & community organisations are still learning about what works and what doesn’t. For many of us, we learn by doing things and reflecting on our experience so we can do things differently next time.

This is more or less how organisations and societies learn too. We are now seeing more talk about knowledge management and other learning tools in the management literature.

This is where consultants can help: above all, our job is to facilitate learning in an organisational setting. All of the assignments alluded to at the beginning of this page can be reduced to a request to help with learning. Even planning must be based on an analysis of what went on before or what’s been learnt by others doing similar things.

Real stories from our work

The best way to illustrate the connection between the challenges and our work is real stories. See our news page.