Meet the bike-loving chief executive who wants to make his charity and himself redundant – Yorkshire Post

HealthMike Milen is a chief executive besotted with bikes whose charity - he says - tells people what they need to hear, but would not always rather hear."

Monday, 15th February 2021, 12:31 pm

His Redcar and Cleveland Voluntary Development Agency (RCVDA) is involved in everything from subsidised car hire, to environmentally-friendly housing, to community broadband projects.

However many people wont be familar with it. He talks to Local Democracy Reporter Stuart Arnold about how the elastic holding the voluntary sector together is becoming frayed, along with his hopes for the future.

Redcar and Cleveland Voluntary Development Agency has been in existence for more than 35 years. We exist to support, promote and develop volunteering and the voluntary sector and are striving to achieve this in an ever changing and more complex world. We have sister organisations attempting to deliver on the same mission in local authority areas across England to bring groups and sectors together, to share insight and intelligence and to help amplify the voice of groups and communities.

And what exactly does RCVDA do?

We help individuals who are interested in volunteering find the opportunities that best fit their requirements, we pull together meetings and conversations and try to make sure information, ideas and intelligence flows back and forth across the voluntary sector, also involving other stakeholders like health bodies and local government.

We help people set up new groups, social enterprises and charities and we offer organisations help with funding and other organisational challenges. We are often the ones telling people what they need to know, but would rather not hear.

Our staff have a desire to see local people take a lead on initiatives that help shift power and control towards communities and support improvements in the quality of life locally.

We have a board that trusts the staff, staff that trust and support each other and have a belief that the best solutions, even to the most complex social issues, start with local people making decisions about what matters to them.

We have a good relationship with Redcar and Cleveland Council and receive core grant funding from them, but nowadays like many organisations we have had to develop trading activities that assist in funding our activities.

What sort of activities do you mean?

Redcar and Cleveland Council helped us establish a subsidised car hire project to help people access job opportunities that wouldnt have been possible using public transport. We also run the Tees Valley Wheels 2 Work scheme on behalf of the Tees Valley Combined Authority.

We are in the process of developing a new urban mountain biking facility and are helping to roll out a community broadband service in Hartlepool. We are bidding to deliver employability support programmes, have developed our own housing company and we own a part of a modular housing business.

Why did you branch out into housing?

We work a lot with South Tees Public Health trying to address some of the long-term health inequalities that plague the area.

Through our core charity support work we have developed a partnership with a local social enterprise, Living Sober, that has seen us become increasingly involved in the development of housing for recovering addicts based on the US Oxford House model, such as Cromwell House in South Bank.

Having taken the decision to become a socially-aware housing association primarily in support of one niche, but important housing project, it soon became clear that there were many groups with a desire to progress housing related projects and numerous areas where the private rental and existing social housing market was failing to meet the needs of local people.

We could have marched or campaigned or lobbied, but to be honest we preferred to act. So we are now looking to disrupt things a bit and bring high quality housing solutions to those who generally have to accept what they are offered.

We are building eco-powered homes so that people dont have to worry about fuel poverty, basing them around small communities so that people have a chance to get to know their neighbours and setting up electric pool car schemes for residents so that they can remain independent for longer.

We will not solve the housing or public health problem that blight the area on our own, but hopefully we can shake things up and get other people engaged in providing solutions. We have made a few mistakes along the way and may make a few more, but we are learning and we will keep going.

What is the obsession with bikes?

I am besotted with bikes, I have ridden since I was a child and I try to ride as much as possible now. I think the bicycle is one of the most important inventions ever made.

As a child it gave me the freedom to travel and explore, as a teenager it provided me with a network of friends and I even met my wife through cycling. It has provided me with the things I value most in life and I want as many people as possible to get the opportunity to ride a bike.

I dont feel at risk when I ride, but I recognise that for some people, when starting out, or returning to cycling, traffic often makes them feel vulnerable. So we need places where people can gain confidence to learn to ride and become more assertive road users.

We have worked with Steve Mussett, Redcar and Clevelands Sport Development Lead, to pull together a proposal for development of a local urban mountain biking facility and we hope to hear back within the next couple of weeks from British Cycling whether or not they are going to back the project with a significant investment.

What next for RCVDA then?

Last year was tough and 2021 looks as though it will again be a challenging year for everyone. Many charities and local groups have stepped up during the pandemic to help their neighbours, their clients, or just those in need in whatever way they could, but the elastic that holds the voluntary sector together is beginning to fray.

Just as in the health service and many other areas relief from lockdown measures cannot come too soon, people and organisations are tired. I worry that we will lose some good local organisations to exhaustion or through financial difficulty.

But we know that the voluntary sector, like the population of the area, is resilient and I think in the longer term we will grow back stronger.I take some of what the Government says with a little scepticism, but I do think we will continue to benefit from significant inward investment.

There may be new and shiny buildings, but the challenge for the wider voluntary and community sector is how do we make sure we and the people we work with most closely dont miss out on a fair share of the rewards from any investment that comes our way.

What keeps you personally going?

I suppose I get up every day striving to make RCVDA irrelevant and myself redundant.

I am an optimist, I want to believe that the system will eventually figure out how to function so that not as many people fall through the gaps, that communities become much more assertive and demanding of themselves and others and agitate for change.

I want to see this as an area where the young choose to leave for the experience available elsewhere, rather than because they dont think opportunities exist for them here. I think we will probably be busy for a few years yet, but that does not mean positive change wont or cant happen.

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Meet the bike-loving chief executive who wants to make his charity and himself redundant - Yorkshire Post