Hashmukh Pankhania - CEMVO

Question: Why did CEMVO hold its recent conference?

Hashmukh Pankhania: There were two reasons.

The first was to showcase and launch the three important reports arising from the work commissioned from us by the Department of Health and NHS Northwest:

i. Guidelines for contracting advocacy and patient support services for patients.

ii. Equity issues relating to elective care and patient choice.

iii. Supporting patient choice: learning from stakeholders.

The second was to allow members of minority ethnic community associations and individuals to engage with senior civil servants on health related matters giving them ‘voice’ and allowing community organisations and the government an opportunity to ‘listen and learn’.

At this conference there were over 200 people who attended, the majority were from BME (Black Minority Ethnic) organisations. 

The reports that we launched were about excluded communities. The research we had undertaken on those three reports were to deal with exclusion and about informing people of the choice agenda that the government has with health and social care.

Another key message we wanted to get across is that of ‘leadership’ in the BME voluntary sector. 

We believe leadership is important in enabling BME communities to take an active part in the civic society of our country. 

Also we think that good leadership of the sector is essential in getting rid of social exclusion, so that things like choice in healthcare can be available to everybody and not just the privileged few.

Question: How did this conference and similar events that CEMVO has delivered contribute to CEMVO’s mission to strengthen communities and tackle inequalities?

Hashmukh Pankhania: We believe that high quality learning opportunities are very effective ways of ‘improving’ our sector. 

Another key CEMVO message is to move minority ethnic voluntary organisations ‘from the margins to the mainstream’.  Eventually, when the playing field is levelled, there will be no need to talk about the BME sector. 

Until this time opportunities like last Wednesday’s are critical to the development of the leadership and competence of minority ethnic organisations on their journey to the mainstream.

At the conference we were trying to enable those who attended to understand the choice that is available to them in terms of elective care. 

The research that we have done shows that not many people are aware of the choice agenda that the government has in terms of elective care. 

We are trying to provide not only a voice for the BME voluntary sectors who attended the conference but to try and get them engaged with the governments agenda on choice in health and social care. 

 An important workshop that we held was on direct payments for social care.  This is giving people the money to pay for their own care and contract with their own carers; the government sees this as a way of extending choice and increasing efficiency of care. 

We find that a lot of people do not know about direct payment, particularly in the BME sector there is big gap to be bridged.

Question: How can second tier ethnic minority-led organisations, like CEMVO, give effective leadership to communities lacking in social capital to enable them to benefit from the opportunities offered by patient choice?

Hashmukh Pankhania: CEMVO has invested a great deal in the development of its staff for example many of them have completed the purpose designed MBA course developed between CEMVO and the University of East London. 

Others are Windsor Fellows having attended the Windsor Leadership Trust Courses. The idea of the Windsor Fellowship is that the Trust brings together a mixture of people from various communities, including the private sector representatives for a week of high intensity learning, for many people it has been a life changing experience.

The importance of such courses is that it provides opportunities to a whole range of people to experience leadership issues within the community; it brings together people from a whole range of organisations and speakers to talk about their experiences.

We have provided leadership training to the groups we have worked with in our capacity building programmes.

We have tried to duplicate the Windsor Fellowship experience at a pilot level by holding residential leadership courses as part of our Tower Hamlets Developing Sustainable Communities Project. 

We get people out of their local environment and have acknowledged leaders work with them; we have found this has a measurable effect on style of leadership. We would like to extend this opportunity further to other groups and individuals.

There is a great need to build leadership within the BME communities because we believe that effective leadership will create an inclusive society that can articulate their needs at all levels. 

This is particular important in creating an inclusive society that can participate at every level of civic life. 

The role of our and other similar organisation is crucial because we have a broad reach with the BME communities; therefore we have the ground level intelligence of the people we work with in terms of what their needs and aspirations are. 

CEMVO plays a very important role, not only helping the BME people in leadership issues, but also in representing the views and concerns of those people at policy level as well. 

Question: Would it be more effective for CEMVO to offer leadership training to BME organisations to enable them to empower their communities?

Hashmukh Pankhania: That is what we would like to do. The conference on 25 April 2007, our work in delivering 12 mini-conferences when we held the CPPIH forum support contract and the leadership and other training that we have delivered through our National Capacity Building Programme and the Tower Hamlets project mean that we have the skills to extend our work to the entire minority voluntary sector. 

Our work is really generic and could be applied to the mainstream. Perhaps this would be the way to do it working with minority and mainstream groups.

Question: How can CEMVO assist the Government extend choice to excluded communities?

Hashmukh Pankhania: Our general experience and that gained from feedback from the conference is that information and empowerment are the ways of enabling choice. 

Key to delivering this is the quality of leadership of the sector. CEMVO can help in the design and dissemination of information (the reports launched on the 25th April show that) and our work in capacity building and leadership development with over 1,000 organisations proves our capability to improve the leadership and competence of our sector.

CEMVO has the willingness to work with different government departments when extending choice.  We would be keen to work with other groups as well as those that we have been working with, to let them know what the choice agenda is.  Working with different primary care trusts (PCT) and the NHS as well, there is a concerted effort in terms of extending the choice agenda for the BME communities as a whole. 

Working with different groups of people means we take on different initiatives to inform the marginalised groups what there is on the government agenda. 

This means funding initiatives that would enable the excluded communities to know what is on the horizon; it takes groups like us to enable that to happen.

Question: How can CEMVO, through events like the recent conference, empower the UK’s minority and excluded communities?

Hashmukh Pankhania: The event itself gave voice to community groups and individuals.  We hope the information and experience will trickle down to other members of communities – the ones who are not engaged. 

The more common events of this type become the greater the effect will be. To deliver a high quality event is expensive. Last week’s was possible through the generosity of NHS Northwest in sponsoring it; this enabled many BME groups to attend the conference.  We hope to run similar events on important topics, in the future and will seek sponsors to do this. 

We were able to provide for predominantly excluded groups an opportunity to come to a conference that gave them the information about the government choice agenda and the opportunity to network with similar groups. 

One of the things we have found with BME groups is that due to constraints on resources often there is not an opportunity for different groups to interact with one another.

At the conference there was an opportunity for BME groups to network with fairly senior people from the department of health which BME groups do not usually to do.

Question: Should organisations like CEMVO be funded properly to act as a way of empowering service users from excluded communities to move to being mainstream influencers of policy at the local and national level?

Hashmukh Pankhania: The answer is definitely yes. We have been working in this field for seven years and have found that there is a continually increasing demand for BME communities to be brought into the mainstream of our society, so they equally benefit from the government agenda and available opportunities.

There is an urgent need to fund initiatives so that excluded communities can be brought from the ‘margins to the mainstream’ and for these communities to become active citizens of our country. CEMVO will be happy to deliver some of these initiatives

Question: Is there a role for CEMVO to run a ‘Campaigners Network’ for BME (socially excluded) communities?

Hashmukh Pankhania: It depends on the type of campaign. CEMVO doesn’t want to rerun the issues around race from the past.

There is a need for campaigns that will help the recognition of diversity and the move from the margins to the mainstream. 

We would like all programmes to become more inclusive to enable BME community to know what is on the horizon, in terms of health, choice and in taking control of their life by making the right choices.  We would be pleased to develop campaigns in this way.

We have been involved in building communities leadership within the BME sector for the last seven years through our capacity building work.

Question: Are there any last comments?

Hashmukh Pankhania: This conference was the first of its kind that our organisation has undertaken, we would like to generate a way of running two a year, billing them as the ‘CEMVO conference on...’ and to do that we need to find a sequence of people sponsoring them. They would be themed on creating a more inclusive society.