Doing Community Power – interviewing the people making it happen
What does community power look like in practice? We spoke to some of the leaders from the ‘Doing Community Power’ panel at our Stronger Things event about their big ideas, overcoming doubters, and what they wish they knew earlier.
- Nick Sinclair, Director of the Local Area Coordination Network at Community Catalysts CIC.
- Hazel Stuteley, Director of Connecting Communities programme. She has worked as nurse, health visitor and health inequalities practitioner within very low-income communities for over 50 years.
- Judah Armani, Designer in Residence at InnovationRCA, Head of Social Impact Lab at the Royal College of Art, and founder of InHouse Records.
- Cormac Russell, Managing Director of Nurture Development and a faculty member of the Asset-Based Community Development (ABCD) Institute at DePaul University, Chicago.
What’s the big idea behind your work?
Hazel: Tackling health inequalities in very low-income communities. We’ve known for many years that individual and community wellness is improved by having a greater sense of influence and control not just in your own life but decision-making where you live.
In C2 we’re known for creating relational place-based community-led partnerships between local people and local providers. These partnerships not only create health but bring lasting transformative change to people and place.
Cormac: Asset-Based Community Development (ABCD) is about a focus on what is positive, not on what is wrong. A key aspect of ABCD is the shift in focus and starting point from ‘deliverables’ to ‘discoverables’. To make the change from top-down ‘services’ to locally driven, community-wide solutions.
This aims to address the imbalance between service providers (organisations, institutions) and the communities that access those services. Instead of viewing communities as passive consumers, it recognises them as active producers: citizens.
The aim is to build positive, balanced and helpful relationships with people where they’re at
Nick: Local Area Coordinators are employed by councils but recruited with local community members to work in and alongside a community of around 10,000 or fewer people. They are present to build deep relationships, connect with all people and families including those facing personal, social or health hurdles that are preventing them leading their good lives.
The aim is to build positive, balanced and helpful relationships with people where they’re at, identifying and building upon people’s strengths and natural supports thus preventing and avoiding unnecessary formal service interventions in the process.
Judah: Co-creating safe and enabling environments where agency can be won back. Design, like creativity, can heal. The role of design thinking is greatly valued in society but often doesn’t make it to the fringes of society, where arguably it’s needed the most.
I operate in decades, providing the space and time to understand the landscape of an area like homelessness (10 years) or the criminal justice system (six years) and from within that space co-create the environment for change to take place. Not creating the change, but creating the environment for change.
What’s the first time, or the most memorable time, you can remember seeing the impact of community power in action?
Judah: In Scotland, when a community I was co-creating with, who were homeless, designed their own manifesto to screen potential researchers. A well-known area within Edinburgh provided many social researchers all the opportunity to capture ‘data’.
Over time it became apparent that the community didn’t like how they were being treated like experiments to be picked up and put down, mined for information. So together we co-created a process that every researcher needed to go through before the community decided if they were going to work with them and allow them access.
Hazel: In two years (1997-99) as a Health Visitor. Watching a so-called Cornish ‘sink estate’ transform before my eyes – the people and the place – thanks to a community-led partnership.
Witnessing emergence of astonishing outcomes in health, educational attainment, housing, employment, crime and many more. And all with no start-up funding whatsoever.
Cormac: When my father allowed a Traveller family to camp in our garden against the protests of his neighbours.
Nick: I fondly remember attending a community-led group in Derby in 2019 where local people had acquired a room and small kitchen owned by the local housing organisation.
They were meeting regularly to build connections and enjoy each other’s company without any defined purpose or outcomes other than that. Their space had a really warm, welcoming and safe atmosphere about it and was clearly a hotbed for local skills sharing and a source of natural support in the community.
Their Local Area Coordinator, Kim, was there alongside them, not to run the group or connect only with people she knew – but to support the community to lead.
What one thing do you wish you’d known before you started?
Cormac: Just how persistent institutions are when it comes to closing down citizen space rather than opening it up.
Hazel: That it’s ok to start without money – in fact it’s the best and only way. Create the right relational enabling conditions and communities will generate funding for themselves to tackle issues that matter to them and impact on wellness.
It’s ok to start without money – in fact it’s the best and only way.
Nick: So many of the answers we seek to our ‘social problems’ can be found in our relationships with each other. Properly resourced specialist service interventions and responses are one part of the answer, but they need to be designed in a way that complements and nurtures the natural authority of local people and the assets of our communities.
Judah: The power of humility, kindness and compassion supersedes skill, frameworks and methodologies.
What are the most common objections you encounter to your work and how do you answer this?
Nick: Why can’t we extend this to a bigger population footprint? Through our Network, we help people explore how Local Area Coordinators are working very locally, building on people’s strengths and nurturing community power as a result.
If we work at too big a population level, we tend to end up focussing on deficits – triaging people, signposting and endless waiting lists.
Hazel: ‘It’s all been tried here and nothing works’ or most commonly ‘We’re already doing what you do and it’s not working’. Really?
The best way to respond is to take them physically or virtually to a successfully transformed community to see for themselves and talk to those who’ve made it happen – the residents and partner agencies. We then offer a ‘theory and practice’ experiential learning programme in how to create the relations and conditions that led to this.
Judah: Isn’t design about drawing? Or, why are you here?
My response is that design is about creativity, we are all creatives, and creativity allows us to reimagine where we want to be. I am doing this because I need change in my life and I have found it’s easier for me to change when I am amongst people who also want change too.
Cormac: It’s too boutique, too small to matter. What about risk, safeguarding; quality, scalability; measurability?
What are you hoping to share at Stronger Things?
Hazel: To offer a new definition of ‘community’ based on 30 years of ‘learning by doing’. To say that place based partnerships are a ‘no brainer.’ Also, the importance of language and how many of us unwittingly reinforce and weaken community strength by the words we use.
Judah: Landscapes – how they shape us and how we shape them.
Cormac: Stories that feature citizens being strong together.
Nick: I am hoping to share how I see the principles and features of Local Area Coordination as part of the community power equation by sharing some reflections and stories.
And apart from this panel, what else are you looking forward to at this year’s Stronger Things?
Nick: I am really looking forward to meeting many people I’ve only ever met virtually at the Stronger Things Town Square – that sounds like a fab idea. I am very excited to be in the presence of some of my heroes too.
Hazel: Despite, maybe even because of, the awfulness of the pandemic, it feels like there’s a new excitement and energy sweeping the country around community strength. This event appears to have captured this.
So as a pioneer for over 50 years I know I’ll be sharing with like-minded and awesome people doing amazing things, many of whom I’ve not seen for years – so some reunions – and quite a party to look forward to!
Cormac: Humility and lots of honest conversations about relocating authority.
Find out more about New Local’s work on community power in practice.
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