Power is for creating, not taking
Politicians talk about power like it’s something you give away. That couldn’t be further from the truth.
At Good Things Foundation we’ve been thinking a lot about the power of the Online Centres Network — a diverse group of 3,000 community centres, libraries and even pubs who work with us to improve the lives of the people in their communities every day.
We’ve also been thinking about what makes Good Things Foundation different as a charity or social change organisation: why we prioritise impact (helping more people) over growth (in income or size), and our belief that the two can be mutually exclusive. We don’t need to take growth and impact as two sides of the same coin. Unlike many large charities, the size of our organisation doesn’t need to correlate directly with the impact that we can have.
This is because of the way we approach our relationship with the Online Centres Network. We’re committed to working with them and through them to grow their resources and their power, not accumulate that centrally or offer a top-down approach.
I was struck, in thinking this through, how many parallels it had with a book, The Liberal Republic, that I was lucky enough to edit when I worked at Demos early on in my career.
“Discussions in political circles about ‘devolving’ power approach the question from the wrong direction. The default assumption should be that individuals have power, unless there is a good reason reason for consolidating that power upwards to communities, local agencies, national government or international bodies.”
At a time when politicians were throwing around words like “double devolution” and “devo-max”, The Liberal Republic flipped that kind of talk on it’s head. But if power isn’t something we can give away, I’m not convinced it’s something we all as individuals hold inherently either. Many people will be familiar with the feeling of powerlessness in some aspect of their lives, whether it’s not being able to see the next step to take to stop sleeping rough or watching your child have their heart broken for the first time and knowing there’s nothing you can do to fix it.
Perhaps then, power is something we create. Not by working on our own, but working together to solve problems.
The ideas in The Liberal Republic might have been lost on politics, where now even devolution appears to be little more than a cost cutting exercise, but those ideas were already happening elsewhere: in technology.
From open source software to the distributed networks that power Bitcoin, programmers were harnessing that power, distributed amongst individuals to make things that would change the world. Lots of people, working together to create something that is more than sum of its parts.
You can see where I’m going with this.
At Good Things, we support a network that has the potential to:
- Support individuals to turn their lives around
- To help communities come together
- And to support society to approach problems differently.
We’re good at doing at doing those things in that order — great with individuals, but recognise the challenge societal change presents.
I think about our network as a platform for social change. That platform isn’t solely for the use of Good Things Foundation. It needs to be a platform for centres themselves too, where they can build relationships and communities horizontally to share their work and ideas and learn from each other.
That is what creating power looks like. So when politicians talk about giving power away, we should tell them — it’s not theirs to give. It’s ours to create.
