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.
It is because it was where I started on my road in youth and community work. I went to school down the road and you reached a point where the option of Scouts or the Combined Cadet Force was supplemented by the possibility of doing some form of service to the community instead. I elected to help out with an organisation in Balsall Heath called Care for the Elderly. I visited a frail old lady called Mrs Dixon and savoured the delights of cups of tea with sterilised milk during my hour-long weekly conversation with her. I attended the day centre for the elderly, plonking on an old piano to provide the backing for sing-alongs to classic London wartime tunes. And, simply because I was passing through, I kicked a ball around on some waste ground with the local kids. It was on that waste ground that I helped to lay the first railway sleepers that were the start of an adventure playground. And the St Paul's adventure playground was the very start of the project that eventually became the Community Development Trust.
I remained attached to the area, working there for the city's social services department and helping out with holiday camps for deprived children run by the family service unit. Even Birmingham Young Volunteers, which subsequently pioneered social education and neighbourhood projects across the city (and which I chaired for a while) started there. I make no big claims about my contribution. It was rather the other way around: from little acorns, oak trees grow. There will be no big society if trees are cut down and acorns are cast on stony ground.
Howard Williamson is professor of European youth policy at the University of Glamorgan
