Community Power Podcast Series 1 Episode 6: Cooking up a storm in Brinnington

Episode 6: Cooking up a storm in Brinnington

Chris Allen

Hello and welcome to the Community Power Podcast, a weekly series brought to you by the Local Trust and the Community Wealth Fund campaigning to ensure the next wave of dormant assets is committed to supporting our communities. My name is Chris Allen, and in this series, I’m teasing out some of the best examples of what’s happening in communities through the experiences of those living and working on the front line and focusing in particular on what happens when you give local people the money, the power and the assets to make a difference in their neighbourhoods. With me is series producer Beth Lazenby. Who are we going to hear from this week, Beth? 

Beth Lazenby

This week, Chris, you’ll be talking to Mark from Brinnington, and he’s going to be chatting to you about the emergency response that his community put on when the pandemic first broke out. 

Chris Allen

Thanks, Beth and yes and in case people don’t know where Brinnington is, I asked Mark a little bit about the area. 

Mark Mitchell

We’re basically on the northeast edge of Stockport, which is in the Greater Manchester area. We are pretty much a stereotypical council estate. 

Chris Allen

Also, reputedly one of the most depressed places in Britain. 

Mark Mitchell

Also, also in the press this week, one of the most deprived places in Greater Manchester. 

Chris Allen

This doesn’t help, though, does it? These labels, they don’t help at all. 

Mark Mitchell

Those are cold, hard facts. They’re true. They know the depression figures are so high, is because people in Brinnington aren’t afraid to talk about their depression. 

Chris Allen

That’s a good thing, though, isn’t it? That honesty will help people to come to terms with the situation in which they find themselves. 

Mark Mitchell

Honestly the sense of community here is like nowhere else I’ve lived in my 51 years. Once again, we’ve got the press coming to us saying, ​“Oh, would you like to talk about the terrible circumstances in Brinnington?” And what we normally say is ​“No, but we’ll tell you about all the good stuff we’re doing”. Unless you’ve got the residents and the workers and the partners, unless they’re on your side, they want to make things better, you can throw all the money at it, all the people at it, you can parachute in any sort of want — it will not help. 

Chris Allen

And by the part of that, you’ve got to you’ve got to take away that stigma we were talking about as well, so people don’t believe that about themselves. 

Mark Mitchell

Exactly. The first thing I noticed when I started looking around Brinnington when I moved up here, is people took responsibility. I mean, like any area, there are issues. I’m not going to pretend there’s not. But the vast majority of people in Brinnington want to live here. People come to me every week and say they love the estate. What can they do to work on it? And what can they do to help it? And it’s not just us, it’s not just the Big Local. There are three or four separate pools of community support that you draw on. 

Chris Allen

Yeah.

Mark Mitchell

And they’ve all got that same ​“We don’t care what you say about bringing we want to make a change. We want to do things for our neighbours”. If the pandemic proved nothing, it proved that every single community has good in it, and some of them have gold. Somebody walked through the front door of our hub with a shopping bag full of shopping they just picked up at the B&M and said, ​“Can you, can you give this to people who need it?” And then we had people phoning in on the help lines saying, ​“I just need somebody to go to the doctors for me to pick up a prescription. I just needed some tea, or some coffee or something, some soup”. 

Chris Allen

Well, we’re recording this the week when we come out of Plan B. Who knows what the future holds? When lockdown happened, as you were saying, the government reacted. You know, let’s face it, I think most people in the country, including the government, were in something new. It was it was learning as we go along. You mentioned Big Local area, you mentioned the other community groups there as well. Do you feel because you’d been working there together as a community, you were more ready for this than some other communities? 

Mark Mitchell

To be honest, we were just one of…the certainly two approaches, including us, that I knew of. People knew they could come to us. They could, at the very least, they could ask if we knew where they could get help. 

Chris Allen

Because you mentioned ​‘our hub’, you’ve got a hub. You’re working there. And not every community has a hub and has a worker there that can even do any support. So when we went into this, you had some advantages. 

Mark Mitchell

Yes and no. Our hub is pretty much geared up as a meeting space. It was an area that was full of people. It was constant, with a constant in and out of people. And as soon as they said the words ​“lockdown”, that became, well, we’re too small to let people circulate according to the way they want. Suddenly it stopped being, this is a community hub, and started being well, now how to use it to benefit the community? The day that the announcements came out and people started bringing things into it, we fell in,…I won’t say was the greatest piece of luck, because we have a good relationship with local businesses. But our local, our go local, a local SPAR type shop walked in and said ​“We want to help you create food packs. What, do you need?” And we said, ​“Well, what sort of help you offering?” And they said, ​“No, what do you need for food packs?” 

Chris Allen

Oh, it’s a massive that’s a massive offer, for people struggling to survive. 

Mark Mitchell

That is a huge offer. And he came back, and he said, ​“right, where so where do you want this?” And he was pushing a shopping trolley. 

Chris Allen

What that says to me, as an outsider looking in here, there must have been some good, trusted relationships in the area that you’ve been building on for a while. That doesn’t just happen. 

Mark Mitchell

We’ve been there as the Big Local for several years. The hub is new, but the organisation is old, so they know who we are. And I mean, he brought in quite easily, £1000 worth of stock. It wasn’t just him. His staff had chipped in their wages for that week to buy this, these, this food for the community. 

Chris Allen

What if you’d not been there? What if you’d not, if Big Local had not existed, there’d been no community groups there. I’m sure people, people’s hearts would have been the same. They still would have wanted to do it. Wouldn’t they? 

Mark Mitchell

There would have been the community effort that, yeah. I think what we provided was a very handy base of operations. 

Chris Allen

And that was, that was obviously back in the end, well, the end of March 2020, when first lockdown happened. We’re going into this new world clearly. People short of food, people short of medical supplies, people obviously locked up in their homes. They’re isolated, and that was the kind of emergency response, which we hope we won’t get back to. But what I believe has happened in Brinnington and in other places that actually, as need arose, that the immediate need from COVID, but then the other needs that were always bubbling away under the surface there began to appear as well, didn’t they? 

Mark Mitchell

Yes, I mean some of those things, some of those things we’ve been aware of from the start. That there were people, people who didn’t have enough to eat, there were families who didn’t have any support. 

Chris Allen

And this is all tied in, obviously, with the physical needs at the time, people going to hospital as well. And underneath all this, and this is bringing it through as well, the mental health needs that are linked with that. The sense of grief that was coming through, through lost loved ones, but through community centres being closed, through society changing. And I think in Brinnington again, you began to realise that there was a massive mental health need arising. Then this is coming through as well. How did you react to that? 

Mark Mitchell

To be honest, one of the things I found about Brinnington folk, if they see a need, they won’t wait for the Council or the NHS or somebody to parachute in that dramatic solution. They will actually turn around and say, ​“You know what can we do that? Let’s do that”. 

Chris Allen

That brings out something of the pride in the community. It’s always been there. But sometimes the situation brings it out, doesn’t it? 

Mark Mitchell

We’ve always known what a community we’ve got. What heroes. And I’m not afraid to use that word, which is so overused. But the selflessness of some of the people in this community. The number of people who said, ​“Here, make sure this gets to the right place”, or ​“Here, spend this on the right people. I just want to make sure that my neighbours are helped”. I mean, especially, especially with food, was concerned. We knew people who were getting takeaways for breakfast, takeaways for lunch and takeaways for dinner, wonder if the next step is, do we teach them to cook? 

Chris Allen

Is that what you did? 

Mark Mitchell

What we created, was Cooking Up A Storm. A) Who wants to know how to cook? B) Who needs help learning how to cook?, and C) Who needs a little help with getting the fresh to cook? And the first month started out with three people. And by the first lockdown in August, when we actually had to close the hub, we had 80 families on the books. And we were doing a cooking pack of, it would normally be fresh meat, fresh vegetables and whatever herbs and spices that were required for whatever we were cooking. And they’d collect them from the hub. When the community buildings reopened, we came back and we did it in association with the local pantry. As times passed on, some of those families have stopped engaging. We’re now at the point where what we want to do is make sure that families who wouldn’t otherwise engage with us, so perhaps people don’t have access to us. 

Chris Allen

I was gonna say we’re moving into a into a new world of living, living with COVID, people wearing face coverings, you know, when they don’t feel safe and the like. But moving forward in all that you’ve learned through this whole experience of the past few years, and also covering the gaps, because local authorities are limited in what they can do, and you need that community infrastructure, as you were talking about earlier. As we move forward, what do you see the priorities being for Brinnington? And what Brinnington Big Local and the other associated community groups can do in order to support the most vulnerable people? 

Mark Mitchell

What we’re doing at the moment is we’re looking at the engagements we already have and with the local knowledge we have and with the partners we have. We’re looking at extending the hand. 

Chris Allen

Is that, like a network of people, the more people you get involved… 

Mark Mitchell

Oh yes, when I, when I say that, if we talk about the partners, people like local housing and the local council, and they can’t say, ​“Oh, it’s Mr. And Mrs. Jones from number 27” but they can say, ​“Oh, well, we’ve got three families struggle for daily food. We have three families who were interested in learning to cook. We have three families who need this help” and some of that help, we can just go, ​“Yeah, we’ll give that, no problem”. 

Chris Allen

So that local intelligence is really critical then in moving forward, and then you find your way around the confidentiality and GDPR stuff in order to help people. 

Mark Mitchell

We had a local sandwich shop up here, and they’d get a list of people either just got a good breakfast because they needed a breakfast. Or ​“Congratulations, your neighbours have said, you’ve been a hero. This is this is something in, thank you”. But it was all people helping people. At no point even, even though we have the funding from the Local Trust. But without that, we’re still, we’re still people on the street. 

Chris Allen

Even without the money you’ve got the relationships there, haven’t you? 

Mark Mitchell

Exactly the money is just a bonus. 

Chris Allen

Yeah, indeed, and that’s important for, perhaps, for people who don’t have money coming their way. What you’re saying is, it’s about having those local relationships, those people working together as well. But going back to Big Local, you know, one of the national aims of Big Local is that an area will be an even better place to live. And in Brinnington, one of your local targets, one of your local outcomes, is that people will have a raised quality of life. Do you think in Brinnington, you’re getting there? 

Mark Mitchell

To be honest, it is a big target. It’s the biggest but in little steps. Every, every little step forward, every, every extra person that has something to eat, every extra person that knows how to cook, every extra person that knows who to ask for help, every child that knows that they can ask for help. That’s a step forward. And we could run for 100 years, and we’ll never, we’ll never solve every problem, but by God, we will go to our graves pushing towards it. 

And you go and do cause you want to make where you live and where your friends are, you want to make it a better place. I want to make this a better community for my daughter and for the friends I’ve made along the way. And there’s something satisfying about being able to say, ​“See that person over there smiling. See that that garden has been built over there. See that community cinema. See that that project there, I was part of that. I made that difference.” People are doing this because we did it and that’s what every member of committee does. 

Chris Allen

Thank you to you and also through you thank you to all the people who work with you, especially those who are volunteers in the community, all your partners as well, because that’s obviously what’s making the difference in Brinnington as a whole. 

Mark Mitchell

Yes, thank you very much. 

Chris Allen

That’s Mark Mitchell of Brinnington Big Local who combines both being a worker and a resident in the area. Where can we find out more about Brinnington, Beth? 

Beth Lazenby

As always, you can find all of the information you need in the show notes, including a link to their website, where you can learn a little bit more about some of the other projects going on in Brinnington. 

Chris Allen

Thanks, Beth. And there’ll be another Community Power Podcast for you next week, which is brought to you by the Local Trust and the Community Wealth Fund campaigning to ensure the next wave of dormant assets is committed to supporting our communities.