Participatory community enterprise: A new way of doing work with inbuilt flexibility

The way that work is structured and produced creates dilemmas for integrating work with the rest of life – family, friends, leisure, community activism, creativity, personal development and personal interests. The way that salaried or paid work is structured creates the kinds of communities we live in. At the same time there are large numbers of people excluded from even the possibility of decent, paid work in formal organisations, confined to worklessness and poverty. The dominant response to this is skills and productivity deficit (explanation) and skills training and development (solution). I will suggest a different way of approaching community, work and family tensions: an approach that enables communities to identify need and create work to meet these needs. This approach is known variously as part of the solidarity economy or the participatory civic economy. I will present some examples of civic participatory work developments that have the potential for community building and incorporating flexibility and family support.