Community Power Podcast Series 2 Episode 1: Building community resilience in ‘an age of permanent crisis’

Episode 1: Building community resilience in ​‘an age of permanent crisis’

Chris Allen

Hello and welcome to the Community Power Podcast brought to you in association with Local Trust, showing what happens when you give local people the power, the resources and the money to get on with doing stuff in their own neighbourhoods. With me, as ever, is our series producer, Beth Lazenby. Now from the background noise, Beth, we know we’re not sitting in the studio as we normally are. 

Beth Lazenby

No, so we are at Connects 22, which is our annual celebration of all things Big Local. So, this year is all about celebrating local, and we’re joined by lots of partnerships and organisations talking about all things affecting communities. 

Chris Allen

And it’s lovely to see, looking around the room, there’s a real buzz, as people can hear, but lots of faces, people smiling, getting to know each other again. Perhaps haven’t seen each other for a year, but also getting lots of key information around cost of living. 

Beth Lazenby

Yeah, absolutely. So this year, obviously, cost of living is something that is really affecting communities, and we’ve got lots of sessions throughout the weekend where they can learn from other organisations, the support that they can get. But we’re also really keen to hear from them about the kinds of ways that they are dealing with the cost of living crisis, and what more we can do to support them. And also the support that they need that goes beyond kind of Big Local and Local Trust as well. 

Chris Allen

And I’m going to go off and have a natter with a few people now and see what they’re up to. 

Beth Lazenby

Fab.

Chris Allen

And with me is Nick Gardham from the Cost of Living Alliance. Obviously, we’re thinking about the cost of living crisis, so you’ve got a key role to play. 

Nick Gardham

Oh yeah. Well, thank you very much. I think it’s a key role, but it’s also one which shouldn’t have to be a role. We shouldn’t be in this crisis. 

Chris Allen

I take your point about it. We shouldn’t be here. But for many people, cost of living is a crisis right through the whole of their lives anyway. So you’ve got an ongoing role to play. 

Nick Gardham

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, many people you know were in crisis before, the actual, the actual, supposed cost of living crisis took hold. I mean, many of the communities that we’re hearing from today is it’s decades of entrenched poverty that they’re facing deep issues. And you know, they’re now just responding to it with food banks and warm hubs and all the many different things. But I was hearing a story yesterday of a 72 year old woman who’s working as a volunteer at an Advice Bureau, and she sees six people a day, and she’s booked up till November. Just providing advice and support to people who are in crisis and trying to get out of that. 

Chris Allen

And what’s the kind of impression you’ve got of the areas and the people who come and talk to you because they are giving their time as you say there. And they’ve been doing this for 10 years or so within the Big Local programme, and others, you know, for longer, within other programmes. So what’s your kind of thought about them? 

Nick Gardham

I mean, I think everyone I spoke with today and yesterday has just been genuine and honest. And I think, you know, they give it an honest picture of what their life is like. And for them, it’s not easy. But actually, despite all the challenges they face, is an immense amount of positivity and enthusiasm to try to do something. I think that’s really important. So despite the national noise and the rhetoric that’s going on, they’re actually doing practical things on the ground that are making a difference to those people and the people that they work with. 

Chris Allen

And it is, it comes down to local communities, doesn’t it? And people just saying, let’s get on with it. 

Nick Gardham

Absolutely. It’s about, what can we do with what we’ve got to make things a bit better for people in the short term. And you know, one of the one of the things the alliance is doing is trying to push for that and push for people to share and give examples of where good things are happening. Whether that’s in Wembley, where I heard stories yesterday, or in Collyhurst, in Manchester, or in Cumbria. I mean, we’re just trying to create opportunities for people to connect and share and tell about the great work that they’re trying to do to help people to mitigate the impacts that people are facing. 

Chris Allen

And if people want to get in touch with yourselves, we’ll give out the details. But what’s the kind of support you can give to local areas? 

Nick Gardham

Well, I think you know, we what the support we’re giving right now is, on the one hand, is just connection, people coming together to help one another, and just to share, just share examples of stories. But one of the big things we’re trying to do is we’re organising cost of living summits around the UK, which is bringing together partners from the private sector, the voluntary sector, the public sector, to come together to look at how you can actually work collectively and collaboratively to address the impact. And we know that actually, on a local level, only so much can be done, but a lot can be done to encourage relationships and connections. 

So we’ve got a Cost of Living Summit coming up for London. We’ve got one in the pipeline for Manchester. We’ve got one coming up in Wrexham. There’s a number of these cost of living summits now popping up around the UK, and we’re hoping that in – certainly in the short term –these will create some policy asks, which will work on a national scale, hopefully. But more importantly, on a local level, it’s going to encourage new relationships and connections that hopefully will help people in the short term. 

Chris Allen

So watch this space. 

Nick Gardham

Hopefully, yeah, let’s keep watching this space. 

Chris Allen

And here’s someone now who’s working on the front line. It’s Emma Anchor from L 30’s Million in Liverpool. Emma, what’s the kind of impact that the rising cost of living crisis is having on your community? 

Emma Anchor

Rising cost of living is having a massive impact already on our community. I’d say first and foremost is people’s mental health. People are absolutely petrified of where they’re going to find additional funds from to basically heat and eat. They’re our biggest things. So we’re coming together as a partnership to come up with ideas and ways we can help and support the community, but without making them feel sort of, they’re looking for support. So we’ve decided, we’ve come up with some initial ideas. We are looking to employ a CAB (Citizen Advice Bureau) worker within our area so people can get professional support around different things. We have brought on board the Green Doctor project. She’s amazing. So she’ll do energy assessments, provide free light bulbs and different ideas to help cut back on costs and obviously make that money stretch a little bit further. 

Chris Allen

Obviously, a lot of people live with cost of living a lot of the time. So why is this need so particularly pressing at the moment? 

Emma Anchor

Okay, so we’ve found through conversation, the need is massive within our community. It’s hitting everybody, and it’s hitting working families as well as families on benefits. So what we’re doing as well is we’re going to provide sort of family based activities, provide a warm space for people to come together, and hopefully that’ll connect and strengthen the community even more. It brings people together, and everyone realises they’re not alone. We’re all facing this together, and provides them with some support, but sort of non direct support, where they still feel they can sort of bring it together and sort of have ownership as a community. 

Chris Allen

Now there is some support on offer obviously. Is more needed? 

Emma Anchor

I think more support is needed. Listen, we can never have enough support. And I think with a crisis this big, as the winter approaches, it’s only going to get worse. Temperatures are going to drop, but people are still needing to go to keep warm and eat. So I think more sort of financial support, in my opinion, is going to be needed. And that on a wider scale. Big Local we can’t fix everything as much as we try. And we can put things in place on a sort of practical level and a small financial level. I do think it needs to be addressed higher up yeah, definitely. 

Chris Allen

And someone else wandering around the hub here at Big Local Connects is Mark Mitchell from Brinnington Big Local up in Stockport, helping communities all the time who are struggling. But Mark, what are the main ways in which cost of living increases are impacting on your community? 

Mark Mitchell

Well, along with the obvious answer, that we’ve seen prices on our gas and electric, our utilities rise, the fact that even the smallest purchase from the shops these days, is sometimes double what it was previously. Sometimes there’s 10 P going on to a price every time you go shopping. So we’re seeing the cost of living just skyrocketing. 

Chris Allen

Obviously, up in Brinnington, you have the privilege of being a Big Local area, having some funding come into the area. And as your position as a community organisation, and all the experience you’ve learned through the COVID crisis has it helped you respond, is it helping you respond now to the cost of living crisis? 

Mark Mitchell

Our first move, obviously, has been to open the doors of the community hub to anyone who needs just, even just a cup of coffee, a piece of toast. We’re going to be becoming a warm hub. To be honest, a lot of the things we learned under COVID, the speed of response, the agility of response, has helped us no end with responding to this crisis. 

Chris Allen

And finally, Mark, what more do you think needs to be done to support struggling communities, not just yours, but everyone’s? 

Mark Mitchell

I think, right now, at a time when everyone is coming together, when local churches, local community groups, local community centres, people like the Big Local are all coming together to make sure that our communities are supported, that they have everything they need, more than anything now we need support from partnerships, from our authorities, from external organisations, who would, well, people who should be helping us need to step up and do their job to its fullest. 

Chris Allen

So now I’ve managed to catch up with Harriet Samson from CSE. Harriet, what is CSE? And what do you do? 

Harriet Samson

CSE is a charity, the Centre for Sustainable Energy, and we have been around since 1979 so quite a while. And we work on the kind of dual issues of the climate emergency – so climate change, the climate crisis – as well as the misery of cold homes. So working with households who are struggling to pay their fuel bills, struggling to keep warm in the winter. 

Chris Allen

And what do you think CSE can help Big Local areas to achieve? 

Harriet Samson

So we can work with householders, or work with community actors to support householders on things like understanding your fuel bill, understanding debt management, how you can get kind of the extra support that is available, making sure that householders are tapping into that. 

Then more at the community level, it’s thinking about, what can you do to actually improve the quality of the housing in your community? So what we really want to do is make our housing much more energy efficient, so we’re not needing to spend so much money on energy bills. And also campaigning, like working with local housing providers, the local council, as well as maybe private landlords, to actually improve the quality of the housing. So there’s quite a few different things we can do. 

Chris Allen

With me now is James Austin from the Jo Cox Foundation, Jeremy, tell us a little bit about the foundation. 

James Austin

So Jo Cox Foundation was founded, well, six years ago, after the sort of murder of Jo. Very much trying to continue her work and her legacy and sort of keep that going. So initially, we sort of almost had outpouring of emotion, a lot of donations, and lots of people wanting to commit time and effort to help continue her message. 

Chris Allen

And at the moment, obviously, cost of living is in the headlines. It’s a reality for many communities, never mind at the moment, they’ve lived it for many, many years. In what way do you think the foundation perhaps can support people? 

James Austin

Yeah, I mean, it’s something we’re really, really aware of, and particularly the Great Winter Get Together. It’s one of going to be one of our big focuses this year, because we’re very focused on loneliness, and we’re really aware of it. Cost of living means people won’t be able to make the social connections that they have done previously. So if you were, you know, we were talking to things like the Sea Cadets and stuff the other day, and they’re saying, well, actually, people coming to our halls, they might not have that couple of quid, you know, to actually pay the fees or to get involved, or they might not be able to afford the bus fare. So we’re really focusing on what, really local community events people can go make those meaningful connections. 

And same in the More In Common network, we’re really talking and thinking about groups and trying to support them. We’re putting things on which will sort of address the cost of living crisis, or at least trying to alleviate by providing connection and trying to avoid any tensions building up, or anything else like that. So yeah, I mean, it’s something we’re very aware of and starting to see come through. 

Chris Allen

And bringing people together, you know, it’s easily said and not easily done, isn’t it? And having a starting point, maybe through community programmes, maybe through local faith communities and whatever, that can often be your starting point? 

James Austin

Completely. And it’s trying to work out where people are. I think, rather than, I think there’s always a danger a little bit with communities of saying, you come to us. And I think a lot of what we’re trying to do, work on and trying to do is support, going to them, if that makes sense, and sort of making sure there’s a sense of belonging in the community. We know that’s a major, major factor, because there’s so much great community work out there, and it’s trying to reach places, which maybe it doesn’t always cut through to. 

Chris Allen

That was James Austin. Before that, you heard from Harriet Samson, Mark Mitchell, Emma Anchor and Nick Gardham. Beth’s with me. We’re back in the studio, quite obviously, some real fascinating insights there Beth. 

Beth Lazenby

Very sobering to hear what’s going on at a community level, but I guess reassuring that those Big Local partnerships are there and they are able to kind of draw upon what they learned from COVID and really help give that emergency support to their local residents. 

Chris Allen

Now, a report’s come out recently around different communities, and in fact, really highlighting that those who are poorest were supported the least. And you’ve got another guest lined up for us. 

Beth Lazenby

Yes. So James Goodman, who’s the Director of Partnerships and learning at Local Trust, has been working really closely with Common Vision, who’ve brought out this report all around community resilience, and he’s got some really interesting reflections that he’s going to share with us. 

Chris Allen

And the first thing I put to him was there’s a lot of communities that he supports, that Local Trust supports are in a permanent cost of living crisis. 

James Goodman

That’s right, obviously, Big Local areas were chosen by Lottery back in the day as areas that were not receiving the funding they should, given the situation on the ground there, that deprivation was higher, much higher than the average in England, and also lacking in in what we call social capital and social infrastructure: places to meet, the opportunities to get together and be a community. And we saw during the pandemic how Big Local areas were able with their resources and their connections and the volunteering, the knowledge, very, very detailed hyper local knowledge of their area, were able to step in and do an absolutely crucial thing, of you know, deliver services in a way that no other organisation, particularly the local council, was able to do. 

Chris Allen

And is that where, sorry, is that where I hope lies now? And I think local authorities, obviously, I think they’re beginning to see that, aren’t they? They’re beginning to say, ​“hey, these guys on the ground know what they’re doing.” 

James Goodman

And actually coming out of the pandemic – although I know we’re still in the pandemic, in a way – the relationship between many Big Local groups and their council was transformed, because the Council could see they can do this stuff better than we can. And, you know, the trust was restored, or trust was developed, and more responsibility and power was shared as a result. And as we’re coming into this, this current financial and economic challenge, we can already see how many Big Local partnerships are orientating to help in similar ways to the ways they did at the start of the pandemic. You know, ratcheting up their support of on energy bills and energy costs, talking about, you know, ​“can we provide a warm hub for our community?”, investing more in helping hand style, direct help for individuals, which many Big Local partnerships, the groups, they’re able to do that because they know the people, because they’re embedded in the community. 

Chris Allen

And you know, obviously, you work for Local Trust, 150 Big Locals around the country. They, as you say, have been stepping up to the plate. They know their communities, their local authorities, are beginning to recognise that. What about now? What’s the message to other areas, perhaps, who are struggling? Where do they where do they start from? What you know, to local authorities who haven’t noticed that the communities on the ground are getting it done. What’s the kind of message to those? 

James Goodman

Well, it’s incredibly tough, of course, and we know that there are, there are 150 places that are fortunate to have Big Local funding. There are many, many other places that don’t have that funding, and hither to quite often, attempts to support those communities have failed because they come in at the wrong level. They come in with a programme designed by government or designed by the local authority, rather than being on the terms of the people who are actually living in those communities. They need foundational support. They need support to rebuild community. And that can’t be done from the outside. That’s got to be done by the people who live there, and that’s why the model that Big Local has – you know, whether it’s called Big Local or something else – putting in the resource and the support and the long term nature of the funding means that people are able to come together and start building trust and building the capacity to work together and start laying down those foundations. Which means that they can organise in a way. Which means that those places are better off when the pandemic hits. 

There’s an absolutely incredible piece of data from the pandemic, which shows that the places that were hardest hit by the pandemic were also the places that were least funded to respond to the pandemic, and that’s because they were areas that lacked, that basically were being neglected and not talked about and passed over for other places where there was activities, a centre, and charities working there already and so on. That is not the case for everywhere in England by a long way. 

If we want a resilient community, we want a resilient society and economy, we need to urgently invest in basically how those communities work together. You know how can we expect people in communities to respond to investment programmes, regeneration, if there’s if there isn’t investment in capacity to do so, you know? So it’s an absolute prerequisite of foundation investment in communities, and it’s also a foundation investment in the future of our country, because we don’t have thriving communities that are able to respond in the way that we saw communities some can respond to the pandemic. Then when the climate crisis really intensifies, we are going to see much more inequality and much more destitution and deep, deep, persistent poverty in parts of this country, and we need to avoid that. 

Chris Allen

That’s James Goodman, who is the Director of Partnerships and learning at Local Trust. Interestingly, then, Beth, he said that some local authorities are discovering that communities can do this stuff better than the local authorities can, and you’ve got a good example coming along. 

Beth Lazenby

Next week, we have Sale West who are based up in Manchester, and they are going to be sharing some insights about the work they’ve been doing, not only to respond to the cost of living crisis alongside their local authorities, but also some really interesting work they were doing around the climate crisis too, with local schools particularly. 

Chris Allen

And some interesting stuff coming along in the rest of the series two. 

Beth Lazenby

Yep. So we’re going to be exploring some more really standout projects from across the Big Local family. So that’s everything from some examples of non violent resistance training for parents, to local cycling schemes that have really transformed relationships in local areas. 

Chris Allen

And as ever Beth, where can we find more information? 

Beth Lazenby

In the show notes. 

Chris Allen

The Community Power Podcast is brought to you by Local Trust, showing what happens when you give local communities the power, the assets and the resources to make a difference in our own neighbourhoods.