At our next meeting on 9th March, from 3.00- 5.00 in the Horsfall Room, Ramsay House, 26 North Bailey, we have two speakers.
Professor Emma Murphy, School of Government and International Affairs, ‘A Political Economy of Youth Policy: Tunisia under Ben Ali.’
Dr Josie Phillips, School of Applied Social Sciences, ‘Making yourself better’: what young people who have been sexually abused say about relationships with therapists.
Please contact tony.chapman@durham.ac.uk if you would like to attend the event.
t a successful organisation should look like have been adopted. And far too often, standardised tools have been developed to build the ‘capacity’ and ‘capability’ of such charities which simply don’t address the specific needs of individual charities.
Professor Tony Chapman and Stephanie Rich are to evaluate the National Youth Agency’s My Money Now programme which is funded by the Money Advice Service. The project brings together tried and tested approaches to inform the development of financial literacy and sustained money management skills and builds on the success of an existing intervention (Barclays Money Skills Champions).
Professor Fred Robinson is working with Professor Keith Shaw of Northumbria University on a new study looking at structures and processes of governance in North East England. They will be finding out who runs public services in the region and assessing how accountable they are. They will be looking at different models of governance — some elected, others appointed. And they will be asking what works best and how we can make governance better.
run things. Many people distrust elites, politicians and the ‘establishment’. There are widespread feelings of powerlessness and alienation – as the EU Referendum demonstrated. But there is no simple answer to the problems facing us. Electing people to run things like Councils or the Police seems attractive, but turnouts are so low that there’s really only limited democratic legitimacy. Appointing people to run services – the boards of NHS Trusts, or the Governing Bodies of universities, for example – may bring in expertise, but can be seen to be about recruiting the ‘usual suspects’. And referendums — making decisions by asking the people — don’t seem to work all that well either.
f the concern was about unelected quangos. They helped influence the debate then – institutions in the region started thinking more about the gender balance (or lack of it) on their boards and the need to have representation from BME communities. Since 2000, some things have changed for the better – but there’s certainly room for a lot more improvement. Many institutions are still dominated by the ‘male, pale and stale’.