Making Austerity a Community Project

Budget cuts are coming, but they don’t have to be painful. In my last of three posts I propose that asking the right questions and working in concert can help cities and towns avoid cuts that will cause suffering for years to come.

Published in

Real Change in Communities

8 min readJul 29, 2020

I cannot say this often enough: Austerity is not quaint. It is a terrible state of affairs. But austerity can be executed in different ways and in some cases even lead to the creation of stronger communities that suffer less.

Creating and implementing an austerity budget is a process. It involves policy and decision-making about what is important and how to go about executing cuts. When the United Kingdom’s government implemented austerity measures, for example, many youth support programs were shut down and policing was eliminated. The result: an uptick in violent youth crime. The government also attempted absolutely ruinous rehabilitation reform that wasted ten years. Both are examples of austerity done poorly.

Other governments, often local, did much better, though. The city of Wigan (see my previous post) was more thoughtful in its move to an austerity budget, implementing budget cuts while shifting some of the funding to communities. Over several years Wigan sustained a combination of measures to achieve its “working with” rather than “doing to” asset-based approach to public services that included new partnerships, community funds, and a major culture change program that encouraged risk taking and fostered shared purpose. Investing in such community assets helped keep services alive, while at the same time created local buy-in and self-reliance. Yes, Wigan innovated a lot, but always relied on high touch community engagement to optimize services on a weekly basis for each neighborhood.

You Must Act Quickly

And this is the lesson that individuals should bring with them into our current financial crisis: It is possible to make sure that your government is on the right side of austerity. It starts with asking the community and government to speak about budget cuts and demand that savings will be combined with investments in community assets. You and your neighbors, working with non-profits and community organizations, need to discuss what to ask for and how you intend to work together.

Don’t drag your feet, or you’ll miss the boat, something that just happened in Santa Monica, Calif. when the city — facing a $300 million budget shortfall — cut 23.8% of its spending, decimating a number of crucial programs. You can also look to the aforementioned United Kingdom example and what happened in Greece. Both countries were hit hard by the financial crisis in 2007 and 2008, leading to budget cuts of around 50 percent in local government. Both countries cut public services amidst a growing social crisis. Greek unemployment in particular saw cuts soaring above 50% for those under 30 years of age. In the U.S, right now, cities like Santa Monica, New York City, and San Francisco are tackling similar shortfalls brought on by COVID-19.

While the U.K. austerity implementation in particular was in many ways disastrous and probably misguided, U.K. prime minister David Cameron got one thing right. He prepared the country earlier than other leaders, saying the country would have at least five years of reduced government spending and baked it into what he dubbed the ‘Big Society’, a largely failed policy that promoted more local self-reliance and smaller government. This leadership helped governments and communities take action early.

Contrast this with how Greece handled the financial downturn. Society and politicians spent the first seven years of the country’s financial crisis obsessing about the terms of a bail-out and possible exit from the European Union — a massively important negotiation, but one that in hindsight local government and ordinary citizens had next to no influence over. Only in 2015 did society begin to embrace austerity and come up with creative and compassionate means to live with it. Many of the resulting programs are very similar to the kind of successful community asset development and peer support measures that emerged in other places.

The U.S., which escaped the 2008 downturn relatively unscathed, needs to reset priorities much like our European counterparts. Many American small towns, municipalities, and cities are facing a highly uncertain policy environment right now. Budget realities are kicking in before federal or state guidance has been provided and before anyone can predict what the road to recovery will look like.

Making the Case for Thoughtful Austerity

Voting aside, if you want any influence over how austerity affects your life, start thinking locally because this is where the majority of public services that matter to you and your community come from. It’s crucial to start right now, too, since speed is of the essence. If we make the right changes now, we can still prevent the worst outcomes.

I have highlighted a number of risks and opportunities around which you could develop your actions — whether you are a public leader, community organizer or resident.

1) Let others know that it’s time to make plans for prolonged austerity

Socialize the idea that you will have some form of austerity hit your community and that acting early means that the community will suffer less from public service cuts. Ask your local leaders to be upfront about the extreme uncertainty they are facing and how they envision your community coping with prolonged austerity and economic hardship.

2) Stop doing what doesn’t work

Every government provides some services and functions that provide very little value. Embracing austerity you can help uncover some of these wasteful programs. Cities should focus on tracking spending, metrics, and results, using your community as a sounding-board. Many times this means preventing costly crises. For example, Community Solutions, a leading non-profit that has helped 13 cities functionally eliminate homelessness, reports that cities that provide homelessness services tend to spend more than those that invest to prevent homelessness.

3) Articulate what asset-based community development means for you

Asset-Based Community Development (ABCD) is a well known practice that provides useful frameworks to develop capabilities among people, instead of focusing on problems. Communities find people, non-profits, and groups with specific skills and match them with those in need. This is the opposite of a deficit-based approach, which waits until problems come up to find solutions. ABCD builds resilience and will help your community cope better if and when public services are cut. Use austerity as a framing scenario to develop ideas on how your community can prepare, what assets you have, and what you can ask from your local government to help strengthen these resources. The city of Wigan used an additional framing question, “How can we prevent demand for public services,” as a useful tool to look not just for partners to solve problems, but prevent them.

4) Be cautious when considering rushed innovation and smart management as fixes

All too often technological or management innovations promise cost savings without service cuts. Over and over this has proven impossible, especially when implemented facing time and budget pressures. One strategy calls for setting aside time and funding for piloting reforms before rolling them out, while at the same time bringing more than enough savings initiatives in the pipeline to allow for delays or failure.

A second successful strategy is to invest in more flexible contracts and agile contract management that will allow you continually improve services in partnership with suppliers and users, checking in at weekly intervals. Lastly, a modestly sized community investment fund can give you a mechanism to help residents start initiatives to participate in serving the community.

5) Make austerity a true community project

Budget and public service cuts will have a big impact on your community, especially since you may need people, volunteers, and local charities to help pick up some of the slack. By starting early, you will allow for more meaningful community organizing and participation by developing the values, priorities, and plans together. Your government is more than its leadership or expert consultants, and many of your front line professionals will need to be part of new solutions. The same applies to community organizations and service users. Invest in developing their capacity to contribute as well as everyone’s capacity to work together closely, at high intervals.

6) Don’t get stuck on conventional wisdom but keep all options open

Leaders should not commit their communities to a path until all options have been widely researched and debated. Austerity means that communities will suffer losses and will be taken to task to cope with deep changes. Monitoring the effectiveness of decisions openly is the secret to both building trust and maintaining a focus on what works in an environment of high uncertainty. Past crises have shown that there is always an alternative and that conventional wisdom may not be the best guiding principle.

7) Don’t get locked into unpredictable futures

Leaders should value flexibility and agility in the way they make decisions, prioritize, and provide services. This means learning from past crises, and avoiding entering into large, long term, and restrictive service contracts with large suppliers that promise cost savings. Instead, we need to optimize for flexibility and local capacity building to stay close to the needs of our residents and advance community self-reliance. I like to ask the question: who would you most like to collaborate with going into an uncertain future? What mindset and values would they bring to the table to be a good partner for your community?

For a long time I believed that budgeting, reform, and efficiency must be problems that governments solved. But after more than 17 years of helping governments do just that, a different conclusion began to emerge, especially as I dug into the recent history of austerity measures. Maybe I was wrong to assume that governments can change on their own. Not because I have come to believe that government is so deeply flawed, politicized or cynical that this cannot happen. Instead, I want to explore a different hypothesis here. What if, instead, we conceived of austerity as a community project in which government makes itself available as a resource?

My call for making austerity a community project is therefore not just a call to action for public leaders, but for all of us. Residents, local organizations, business, and media have a role to play — a constructive role in talking about the cuts in budgets and public services. We need to put forward ideas and have them heard. Collectively, we can slow the fast-moving train of rushed (and mostly poorly conceived) emergency budgets to take more intentional steps forward that build resilience for years to come. Recent history has taught us one thing with certainty: Austerity, delivered in partnership with those affected by it, will lead to less suffering and stronger communities.