Big Society is still kicking around as an idea. Recently it transpired that some of the thinking behind it came from Schumacher's "small is beautiful". That leads to the thought that the current engendering of this idea is so much less than it could have been.
Volunteering is a great idea and helps with social cohesion, but localism and the ideas of Schumacher are much wider than that. These ideas are at the heart of a sustainable economic system.The important thing is that society operates at lots of differnt scales and levels.
Currently our economy is broken, because what we experience at local level is controlled by global turbulence and not by the real economy that we feel in our communities. We see good profitable companies brought to their knees by big banks. What we need is more robustness in our local economy. We need to see local funding and investment in local business, local supply chains, local skills programmes. The recent upsuge in local food supply has shown that this can be possible and can deliver great benefit. We can look for synergies and chances to meet social and environmental goals whilst building a more resilient local economy.
This doesn't mean that global issues don't matter, they do and our local economy will always resonate to the impacts on the gloabl market place. But we can find ways of installing dampers, stabilisers at local level
