Using a sledgehammer to find a knife

Waltham Forest is one of the most deprived areas in London, and in the country. Of England and Wales’s 376 local authorities, it’s in the top 20 for overcrowded housing and single-parent households (a good indicator for poverty and poor outcomes for children), and in the top 30 for unemployment. It has among the highest levels of gang activity in the capital. To say it has a bit of a youth crime problem would be a generous understatement.

The council has introduced mandatory electronic weapons screening in 15 of the borough’s 19 secondary schools. (The Times headline is wrong to call the checks ‘random’ – they are to be routine. It also repeats the rather uninformed story about stab vests.) So far no knives have been found, but the council has denied that it is being alarmist.

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Funders as think tanks

Over at Mission Measurement there’s a good little post cautioning against an overly narrow conception of what philanthropic foundations are for. As Kim Silver (the MM author) says, the US National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy’s recommendation that a good funder should give ‘at least 50 percent of its grant dollars to benefit lower-income communities, communities of color, and other marginalized groups’ excludes foundations with entirely different objectives (such as environmental foundations), and makes some unnecessary assumptions about what they should fund.

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When pigs flu: the social life of pandemics

My post on the social and economic drivers of pandemics (and our fear of them) appears on the Futures Company blog this morning.