Sustaining social infrastructure #1: learning partners
This is the first in a collection of lab notes in which I will share our emergent strategies to sustain social infrastructure which invites participation and generates possibilities. Currently this relates to the platform/lab infrastruture of CoLab Dudley and our work around a regenerative High Street. (I can envisage a time when this series could include emergent strategies developed for wider work initiated through Dudley CVS, the organisation I work for.) In this moment we don’t know which strategies will generate yields, nor indeed what unintended benefits or consequences may emerge.
Emergent strategies are ways for humans to practice complexity and grow the future through relatively simple interactions. ~ adrienne maree brown, Emergent Stratey
From delivery partners to creative partners and learning partners
Dudley CVS’s proposal to the National Lottery Community Fund in 2018 for CoLab Dudley work was called Emergent Cultures. This reflected signals of cultural change observed as a result of creating and investing in a fledgling social lab to unlock and connect latent capabilities and collective resourcefulness among people who live, work and play in Dudley town centre.
Funding was allocated through the Reaching Communities Partnerships programme, which invests in local place-based collaboration, as well as other kinds of partnerships, and not only in work around particular activiyies, but also work to create more fundamental change. (From ‘the projects we fund’ Partnerships funding programme.) The investment covers a modest lab infrastructure; a team of 2 full time equivalents (we spread this across 5–7 team members) and rent and overheads for a creative space on Dudley High Street, with a small budget for creative projects and collaborations.
At the time of working on this proposal (summer 2018) Dudley CVS was partnering with organisations whose interest was in collaboration around delivery of their work. By summer 2019 their delivery models and geographical focus had shifted and they began to move on. At the same time CoLab Dudley’s work was evolving in response to a Collective of local creatives, makers and doers that we were convening. We shifted towards delivery with Creative Partners such as FUSED and Creheart CIC.
We also identified an opening for Dudley CVS to work in partnership with organisations who could help us create possibilities for the medium and longer term. A relationship in which we could explore strategies, and learn together. We looked to Fellow Travellers of the lab who we are already in relationship with, trust deeply, who we could learn from and be challenged by, and with whom we share a purpose. The teams leading CoLab Dudley, Civic Square and APEC Architects have a shared purpose to help design and nurture conditions which support people to connect, live, work, create and play in places which nourish and inspire them.
Bringing Civic Square and APEC into closer relationship with CoLab Dudley and Dudley CVS through a commitment to a strategic relationship was a carefully considered and intentional adaptation in CoLab Dudley’s wider emergent strategy (as well as a response to a need for Dudley CVS to be working in partnership with others on Emergent Cultures.)
Building on relationships we have given attention to nurturing and maintaining
In a paper to our Funding Manager at the National Lottery Community Fund outlining the rationale for this particular partnership arrangement I wrote:
The networked nature of a lab approach means that rather than creating ‘partnership’ arrangements when we collaborate on projects, we build on the relationships we have given attention to nurturing and maintaining, and benefit from informal flows of generosity and reciprocity.
The evolution of Impact Hub Birmingham into Civic Square, a neighbourhood economics lab, public square and creative and participatory ecosystem suggested opportunities to deepen existing long relationships. One of CoLab Dudley’s original team members (Daniel J. Blyden) is Civic Square’s Director of Design — an existing operational connection which could be strengthened through a more intentional strategic relationship. In addition CoLab Dudley has been hugely influenced by my experiences of being on the Impact Hub Birmingham Maker Team and a community member — over seven years of relationships and trust have grown.
The involvement of an architect from APEC (Holly Doron) in CoLab Dudley’s Collective in 2019 following her learning marathon which piqued her curiosity about CoLab Dudley’s work led to Dudley CVS working with APEC on East Coseley Big Local’s plan development. In summer 2020 Holly was bought into the CoLab Dudley team (as a freelancer) to support pandemic response work in relation to High Street redesign. Bringing APEC formally into Emergent Cultures work was an opportunity to both support the lab team’s longer term goals around community-owned / built spaces and bring wider support around Holly’s operational work in the lab.
One of CoLab Dudley’s goals is:
finding ways to sustain the work and platforms which support ecosystems and self-organising activity
Directors from both Civic Square and APEC Architects agreed to help us focus on this goal and generate possibilities for CoLab Dudley to evolve and support local doers, creatives and social entrepreneurs to shape the town. We committed to coming together through a seasonal rhythm of strategic design sessions, giving time to and holding space for a generous process of imagining, designing and learning over a year.
Autumn 2020: ways we’ve grown and what helps us to share
Our first session together was in autumn 2020, a time of year when energy in the land around us is settling and “we begin to prepare for winter months as new possibilities begin to reveal themselves” (Glennie Kindred, Letting in the Wild Edges). We used this session to call attention to ways we might make exchanges between our roots; exploring what helps each of us to share openly, and to feel able to take action and experiment.
It occurred to me after the session when I was writing up notes that things we had said connected powerfully to segments in Rob Shorter’s Imagination Sundial which we use as a navigation tool. Particularly in relation to mental and emotional space (feeling safe both physically and emotionally, acknowledging and honouring our fear and vulnerabilities, and slowing down and making the to create a sense of space and stillness) and practices that connect us (inspiration, limits, playing, yes and what if.
Jo Orchard-Webb built on these connections with a zoomed out observation on a connection to the pacts of collaboration area of the Imagination Sundial, noting that the power and intent of this partnership with APEC and Civic Square highlights the focus upon quality/ authentic pacts. And also a couple of dimensions in relation to gathering places that provide platforms for imagining: our discussions touched on an ambition for a High Street that has an entirely different civic purpose, speaking to the question who gets to design the future high street?, and Jo noted the care taken in creating the virtual place for our connecting in the session.
We also celebrated various relationships and ways of growing in our own ecosystems which are at the heart of our connections with each other as labs / studios.
- Perspectives from CoLab Dudley team members; what does being a social lab built out from Dudley CVS (traditional infrastructure support for the voluntary and community sector) and our High Street location bring to our lab work?
- Perspectives from Civic Square Directors; what does their relationship with Architecture 00 and Dark Matter Labs generate and how does it manifest?
- Perspectives from APEC Directors; what has growing links with social labs in the region (including CoLab Dudley and Wolverhampton for Everyone) been generating?
Spring: thinking long, deep and fast
Our second session took place on the edge of Spring, when spring bulbs were slowly emerging and sap was beginning to rise to tree buds. A suggestion from Imandeep Kaur for some Show & Tell time together fitted well with this time of year when action begins. We shared current current explorations in each of our contexts.
This included CoLab Dudley’s plans with Time Rebels, our collaboration with BCU’s School of Architecture & Design, and work on Dudley People’s Archive.
Civic Square Directors walked us through Block Party, their pioneering work to transform, design and codify the governance, policies and processes of Civic Square. (See Dark Matter on #BeyondTheRules). This generous sharing has led a number of the CoLab Dudley team members to begin looking carefully at governance in a range of ways and contexts, and we have been weaving provocations from Block Party into an enquiry into our participatory platform which is being led by one of our Time Rebels, Juliet Sakyi-Ansah.
APEC Director Naomi Fisher shared her sensing of this time that action is called for; a window for change on High Streets in response to the pandemic. This helped our team to think about many ways in which we might add to and build on the rapid research we undertook in the couple of months after the first lockdown.
Spring 2021: weaving, waves and ripples
We most recently convened in early May - on the edge of summer, “the great fertile time when the interconnected web of life is at it’s most visible and accessible” (Glennie Kindred). We decided to focus connections and ripples through our collective web in three ways:
- weaving threads of connection through from our autumn and winter sessions,
- catching waves of movement from the Show & Tell, and
- mapping complex reciprocity in our relationships as an experiment in making visible what is tricky to track and even harder to measure, through a beautiful activity devised by Jo Orchard-Webb
Jo has kindly written up this activity for others to use / play with / build on. You can download a pdf of her one-sider in the image below here. Do let us know how you find it if you use it.
Reflecting on this activity learning partners talked about:
- feeling safe — a rare gift
- feeling seen
- loyalty
- affirmation
- remembering to value the moments that lead to seedlings
- the more you practice imagining the easier it gets
- the knowledge being in the network / field
Jo noted that this activity explicitly values the gift economy and lifts up how that nurtures abundance, in contrast to extractive scarcity led economies. I will return to this theme in my next lab note on sustaining local infrastructure.
