Guest Article: How a Warm Welcome laid the foundations of Community Power
Lessons from a five month community organising pilot in Warm Spaces
By David Barclay, Good Faith Partnership and Martha Mackenzie, Civic Power Fund
Background
As part of the Warm Welcome Campaign last winter, Civic Power Fund and Good Faith Partnership joined forces to explore the potential for community organising within Warm Spaces.
Pooling funding from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, the Trust for London, and the JRSST-CT, we funded community organising pilots in five areas across the UK. These pilots focussed on Listening Campaigns led by local organising partners across key Warm Welcome Spaces.
In this piece, we have summarised what happened as part of this pilot and the major lessons we learnt about how community organising can embed within organic, civic spaces. We are extremely grateful to our Learning Partner, Liz Griffin at Hidden Depths Research. Liz captured the key lessons from this pilot in real time and her observations form the basis of this piece.
Why Warm Spaces?
Last winter, a movement of bottom-up community support emerged in the form of Warm Spaces. These local spaces were responding to the twin energy and cost of living crises that made the cold weather simply unbearable for many.
The Warm Welcome Campaign data shows that more than 7,000 local organisations received a combined total of nearly 2.5 million visits, with more than 50% of guests saying that they would otherwise have been at home with the heating off.
Perhaps even more significantly, Warm Spaces had a significant positive impact on loneliness and people’s overall wellbeing, as in many cases they came for the warmth but stayed for the welcome.
From the outset, we hypothesised that Warm Spaces could be incredibly fertile ground for building community power.
Although last winter was set to be particularly acute, the vast need communities faced and continue to face is a culmination of decades-long political decision-making that has ignored them.
We saw enormous potential in Warm Spaces to become a powerful catalyst for both systemic change and renewed democratic engagement amongst left behind communities, but knew this would only be realised if their capacity to listen to their communities and organise together for change was nurtured and supported.
We aimed to build a rapid partnership that could embed community organising and democratic participation in the DNA of the Warm Welcome campaign.
What happened in the pilot?
We first identified five Listening Partners on the basis of their existing connection to Warm Spaces and their community organising action.
These partners included Citizens UK and the Centre for Theology & Community in London, the Good Faith Partnership in Bristol, Together Creating Communities/ Trefnu Cymunedol Cymru (TCC) in North East Wales, and Thrive Together in Birmingham.
From April to July 2023, each partner ran a Listening Campaign with leaders, volunteers and guests across key Warm Spaces in their areas.
They learnt about the shared issues guests were facing, explored whether there was scope for shared action, and identified local leaders who might help build and hold power in future.
- In North East Wales, TCC talked to 82 people across 9 Warm Spaces. They supported leaders to attend community organising training. They collected the shared concerns of these leaders and worked with guests to raise their concerns directly with the Public Service Board. The funding allowed TCC to dedicate staff time to organising and to building the political awareness of communities interacting with Warm Spaces.
- In London, Citizens UK and the Centre for Theology & Community talked to 124 people across 10 Warm Spaces. Two key subgroups emerged that are building power around the themes of insulation and support for asylum seekers. They ran an event for all their Warm Spaces in June, which was a key moment in identifying future leaders and sparking interest in working together to engage with local democratic structures. The funding enabled sustained coordination and connection.
- In Bristol, the Good Faith Partnership and Act Build Change carried out 7 listening visits to Warm Welcome Spaces in areas of high deprivation. They identified a lot of shared issues, particularly around housing conditions and loneliness. This was the hardest area to seed organising, with most people focused on overcoming their immediate need. Deeper work is needed to start to identify leaders and build connection and solidarity between spaces.
- In Birmingham, Thrive Together reached around 600 people from 34 Warm Welcome Spaces. Their sustained outreach and coordination across the city had a significant impact, opening a constructive dialogue with the Council and building pockets of organising linked to better housing and the living wage. The Spaces showed clear potential as hubs of civic activity, but will require continued and strategic support to keep this going.
Alongside this, Act Build Change provided vital organising training and coaching. This helped the Listening Partners and local leaders build a common understanding of how best to engage attendees and link their shared issues to action.
As mentioned above, we also commissioned Liz Griffin of Hidden Depths Research as a Learning Partner. Liz shadowed all the Listening Partners to capture lessons in real-time and her observations are explored in detail below.
Finally, in July 2023, we brought leaders and Listening Partners together in Birmingham with Liz to build community, identify shared issues, and plan how to embed organising across Warm Welcome Spaces in future.
What did we learn from the pilot?
With huge thanks to Liz for her detailed reporting, and the open and honest feedback of Listening Partners and guests, we have captured the key lessons below.
The quotes are taken directly from her end of pilot report.
Community Building is a prerequisite to sustained Community Organising
People do not act in isolation. It is through connection and community that they identify shared issues and build the trust and solidarity to work together to change things. But Community Building takes time, costs money and requires sustained and deliberate cultivation. It will not look like organising and democratic engagement in the early stages, but it is from this deep community that organising flourishes.
“The Spaces allow for commonality to be recognized in a very informal way, from which there is potential for solidarity to emerge — for people to look within their groups to address some of their problems, and the root causes of these, together.”
This is uniquely important for people living in poverty or deprivation.
The Warm Welcome pilot showed that people living in poverty or deprivation face multiple challenges in building power and engaging with democracy. Their time and energy is focussed on day to day survival and they are often isolated from community activities due to prohibitive costs.
The state has also failed its basic responsibilities towards them and their loved ones. As a result, they rarely have the time or inclination to jump straight to organising. It is thus vital that we collectively invest in the places and spaces where people can come together without judgement and build the relationships that precede democratic engagement.
“Many of their issues pre-exist the cost of living crisis and Warm Spaces are picking up the lack of locally available advice and support.”
“Often people use the spaces as a way to have a good time and escape their issues — not confront them. Warm Spaces are largely places of hope and happiness, not places of poverty/ need/ issues.”
This reality is documented in a recent report from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation on Power, participation, and transformative change. Sarah Campbell writes that:
“There is a tension between the level of ambition of small grassroots organisations and their capacity to deliver on it, due to funders not recognising the depth of soil preparation required to support seeds of activism to emerge.”
As we also found with the Warm Welcome Community Organising pilot, the JRF report notes that grassroots movement building requires:
“crisis support, community building and power building”.
To get to the end point with legitimacy, it is vital we resource all three components and recognise that radical results can’t happen without deep Community Building.
Warm Welcome Spaces offer fertile ground for Community Building
Warm Welcome Spaces offered both immediate benefit and immediate agency to communities.
Unlike local services, there was no transactional element. As a result, they offered genuine hospitality and dignity and built a sense of community across paid staff, volunteers, and attendees. This was exemplified by the frequency with which attendees transitioned to volunteers.
You can see similar experiences mirrored across the pioneering public living rooms established by Cameradoes. Here, Cameradoes have deliberately created spaces free from jargon and expectation and simply invited local people in for a chat and a cuppa.
“Warm Welcome spaces immediately see people’s dignity. The people who turn up to warm welcome spaces are guests and ‘members’ (without dues). They are not objects of pity but people — like everyone — who are inherently valuable and have worth. In an economic and political context which has left some people feeling like they are undeserving or worthless (the working poor, asylum seekers, for example), this gesture is everything.”
The infrastructure around Warm Welcome Spaces is still nascent, but Community Organising requires structured support
Many Warm Spaces don’t brand themselves as such. Some Warm Spaces are connected to others, but many aren’t. Organising in Warm Spaces requires time and skill.
People running Warm Spaces are not organisers, and many people coming to the Spaces are looking to escape their problems rather than confront them.
As a result, organising worked best in the pilot in places with established organising networks and experienced organisers.
“Warm Welcome is not a brand widely used by the spaces or recognised by those who come to them. But this doesn’t matter to those that come to them.”
With the right support and investment, we can see a clear pathway to turn this Community Building into Community Organising
Leaders and Warm Space volunteers responded well to the light touch training provided. There is clear potential for sustained training around how to have deeper conversations and how to turn these conversations into democratic action.
Warm Spaces contain many potential leaders of lived experience, simply because they are places where people come together organically — and these places are increasingly rare. There is clear potential to help local Community Organisers and Warm Space volunteers identify these leaders, train them, and build connections and cohorts around them.
Warm Spaces that took part in the pilot are already ambitious to join local action and take on shared local issues. With long-term support Community Organisers can play a catalytic role in connecting groups and communities and in turning local listening into local campaigns that boost agency and participation.
If they retain their independent character, they could be fertile ground for voter registration and voter turnout — both as a gateway to talking about power and a route to exercising it.
“Warm Welcome can help organisers build relationships and identify leaders because it is a place that people congregate [with dignity, as equals]. Warm Welcome spaces are a route to bringing people together and identifying their commonality. This is useful in itself and is also the first step in becoming organised. People become organised through connection and association.”
What were some of the other challenges and opportunities?
Warm Welcome Spaces were ultimately about connection as well as warmth. Per the above, this made them uniquely important spaces for Community Building. But it also made it harder to identify common issues, the vital next component of democratic engagement.
“In most cases, the offer is hospitality — not charity. People are there to share a cuppa, a chat, a meal. They are not there to be rescued.”
Warm Welcome Spaces have had a positive response from local authorities, which is important for relationships with power holders. But there is a risk they slip into service delivery and meet needs public services have failed to. It is vital they retain their independent character.
Like many of the Mutual Aid groups that preceded Warm Welcome Spaces, they are responding to a fundamental lack of accountability. Existing systems are failing these communities so they have stepped in to build new ones with clearer local accountability. This is key to Community Building, but it also means overcoming deep and legitimate disdain for democratic structures.
There is huge potential for Warm Welcome Spaces to catalyse organising and democratic engagement. But if we try to make the jump to large, national projects too quickly this will crumble. We need to ensure organising is rooted in the wants and needs of Warm Welcome attendees.
“It’s really difficult for people (space leaders and guests alike) to see the potential to organise around big concepts, or even see their relationship to them. People need something tangible and specific to come together over. Small wins, or actions that could produce a win, are important in building confidence. They bring people together around a change that isn’t on the face of it very political or about social justice. There is scope and an appetite for these small but significant local actions within Warm Welcome. These really matter as they are the bedrock of more ambitious social action and national level coordination.”
Next steps
Looking ahead, we aim to share these lessons to inform others investing in local community power.
A lot of thinking already exists in this space, including excellent and ongoing work by Renaisi, the Young Foundation, and Place Matters and longer-term evaluations of Power to Change programmes and Big Local. We are grateful to all these organisations for their open source thinking that helped to inform this pilot.
As winter creeps around the corner, and the many of the Warm Spaces that did so much good last year get ready to once again support their community, we hope to extend this pilot.
A fundamental principle of successful investment in organising is depth over breadth — staying the course to help a community slowly and sustainably grow their power. As a result, while Warm Welcome will once again have a wide, national footprint, we aim to focus organising investment on the community action already taking place in the areas we worked this year. We hope this can help them on their journey from Community Building to Community Organising.
Finally, the Civic Power Fund will continue to embed these lessons in our existing place-based work.
Working alongside Community Organisers, last year Liz Griffin produced a Learning Framework for the Civic Power Fund that seeks to help us capture when and how progress towards power is happening. This Framework guided many of the lessons we sought to learn through the Warm Welcome pilot and we can’t wait to put the findings into practice.
