"Stability, knowledge rooted firmly in the real world, and a fierce drive to make things better." Community power celebrated
We’re not often aligned temperamentally with the Guardian writer John Harris - we require a little more energy and optimism in our mornings. But credit is due with his latest column, tied to the paper’s Xmas charity appeal and his forthcoming documentary, celebrating the creative and constructive force of community-initiated regeneration.
We’ll highlight below the groups John focusses on, and then cite some of (and tussell with) his key points:
Ambition Lawrence Weston
Seven miles from the middle of Bristol, the Daily Alternative covered ALW earlier this year and in 2020. John’s piece shows that the “social infrastructure” this community group is building includes the tallest wind turbine in England, whose company will be paying funds to people crippled by fuel bills locally. Bristol. Ambition LW is also working on plans for 36 new houses, “26 of which will be offered for genuinely affordable rent, with the rest split between shared-ownership properties and selfbuild homes.”
Selby Trust
The Selby Trust in Tottenham, north London, is based in a disused secondary school but soon moving to new premises. Reports John, “its ‘food hub’ – which is a portal into help with no end of issues – began in 2020, and initially helped about 13 households a week. Now, that number has increased a hundredfold. It takes both dedication and expertise to deal with a workload like that.”
Arts Factory
Arts Factory is based in the Rhondda valley in south Wales, serving local communities with food-growing, nursery groups, advice services and health and wellbeing activities). As they describe in their video embed below, they are viable by providing services a like a in-house graphic design business, a second-hand books sold on Amazon, and a useable meeting space.
We were delighted to read John’s conclusions drawn from surveying these kinds of groups:
We can’t wait for the state to solve urgent problems for communities: anxieties about whether these people are just replacing state services - a la the Big Society - are misplaced. As Harris says, “most of the groups I have met have given the communities they serve an even louder voice: when they come together, people tend to get more politicised, not less”.
Establishing community power could make the state a learner and partner: there is a threat of exhaustion, if these groups are only addressing our urgent crisis, and there’s a constant scrabble for funds and donations. “But imagine if the people involved were able to concentrate a little less on hunger and poverty, and develop the kind of work they do in other fields, with dependable financial help from local and national government?” Their approach to “loneliness, mental health, long-term unemployment, the kind of care that happens outside institutions”, even the growing of local small business, is something the state is poor at.
We’re going to sound our klaxon here on govt support…
NOT if the sense of agency and achievement that comes from these initiatives is just absorbed by local and national bureaucracies, the funding generating a welter of KPIs. Perhaps large-scale state responses should be more along the lines of a Universal Basic Income and shorter working-weeks, which give people space and time to be more civically active.
And a radical approach to land reform, which would empower communities to re-develop (and even re-enchant) their localities, by tilting the property and development laws further in their favour.
We’d also argue that the most exciting aspect of these communities is their cosmolocal nature - grasping their conditions, but drawing ideas, contacts and resource down from a global network/commons of consciously self-determining communities, of many different kinds.
John ends by contrasting leadership styles in the UK of today. From the UK government, there has been
lies, ego-trips, lurches from one approach to another, and reckless actions based on abstract ideology. The community activists I have met, by contrast, have stability, knowledge rooted firmly in the real world, and a fierce drive to make things better. Therein lies something that has felt vanishingly rare this year: a real glimmer of hope.
More than a glimmer, we would suggest, if you look into some of our categories on the Daily Alternative (especially Community and Yes We Can).
And read this week’s editorial later today, which sees in our work on CANs a source for the creativity and innovation that Harris is inspired by.