Big society requires small projects to grow

I have not thought about the St Paul's Community Trust in Birmingham's Balsall Heath for many years. Indeed, I used to get rather fed up with the public profile of its head, Dr Dick Atkinson, who was often the British spokesman for the sociologist Etzioni's advocacy of something called "communitarianism". Atkinson did, however, write an important book called Cities of Pride, subtitled "rebuilding communities, refocusing government". The St Paul's project was the tangible illustration of his argument.

Now Birmingham City Council has cut the project's funding by a third and all its youth services are to go. The six youth workers have been made redundant. This has left an air of poignancy in my mind, not because of Atkinson's achievements in one of the more deprived parts of the second city, nor because the project was apparently an inspiration for the government's big society agenda, which I did not even know.