How Might We Create Better Futures for Left Behind Places?
The pace at which the world is changing is heady business, these days.
The wheels of globalisation have long been turning, but in 2021 — where COVID-19 ravages communities from Bangalore to Burslem, the media cycle comes at us from every continent, 24 hours a day, and technology ups the ante on both the horrors and hope facing humanity, no matter how remote our location — it’s spinning fast.
Yet, for the people whose places were shaped by the bounties of the last century — often overlooked as younger generations migrate to cities, live their lives through a smartphone lens and ride the wave of the technological age — what’s surprising is how the cares of Millennials, and Gen Z coming up behind them, parallel with our most vulnerable communities.
As the promises of capitalism dissolve, young people are struggling to find work, affordable housing and accessible support in a world which cares most about their data. Here, they find themselves in a similar predicament to the people struggling in coastal towns and ex-industrial regions, whose economic and social value has been long deemed past its best.
While young people focus on the cultural challenges faced by our age — identity politics and equality being demanded via the social platforms which give us all a voice — the people of Blackpool, Middlesbrough and Staffordshire are facing the personal struggles experienced, neighbour to neighbour. Yet, on challenging structural inequalities, they both align.
Younger generations now expect the businesses and institutions that they engage with daily to think beyond profits, to the wider impact industry has on the world. Marginalised communities — where local authority budget cuts have supercharged decades-long decline — are challenging national institutions on how they revive the places they’re here to serve.
Lockdown’s impact on youth unemployment is being addressed through the government’s Kick Start scheme, funding employers to recruit those whose futures we fear may be wasted, we have a root cause solution for an issue that could damn a future generation. Yet, where are the systemic solutions for those communities no longer perceived to have a future?
The Need
As the U.K. emerges from the second wave of the pandemic, what’s become evident is the cost of long-standing structural inequalities for those people living in hot spots of deprivation. Places where low levels of educational attainment, limited job opportunities, low paid work (when it can be found) and poor health were only exacerbated by COVID-19.
With people’s circumstances made worse through the struggle to access school online, redundancies and business closures pushing more people onto universal credit and pre-existing health conditions increasing the risk of severe illness from coronavirus, it was community organisations, charities and social enterprises that waded into the breach.
Here, the long-standing relationships, community understanding and interconnected infrastructure of these organisations ensured local authority support and business resources could be deployed, and the food shared, prescriptions collected and connections maintained were what sustained those people who struggled most during 2020.
Now, as the vaccine rolls out and we look to level up the country, finding strategic, scalable and sustainable solutions that help communities thrive is essential. In Stoke-on-Trent — a city that ranks 12th in an index of deprived neighbourhoods in the U.K. with the lowest life expectancy across North Staffordshire — is already exploring how.
Through its Powering Up strategy, the local authority is rightly honing in on the root causes of the city’s issues, prioritising education and skills, economic investment plus health and productivity in the wake of the pandemic. With the aim of attracting wider partnerships and investment, however, what’s apparent is that the lens is predominantly capitalist in nature.
For UnLtd’s Resilient Community in North Staffordshire, however — a collective of social enterprises, who have long listened to, worked with and supported communities — there are bigger questions to be asked. In a city and region where the legacy of the potteries has given rise to a proud and creative community, what is it that the people who live here want and need?
The Opportunity
More often than not, it’s hard to say.
A recent report from Localis on Renewing Neighbourhood Democracy, however, flagged how ever-tightening bureaucracy, a lack of investment in social infrastructure and poor connection between local government and the communities they serve is part of the challenge.
With councils constrained by redundancies and reduced budgets, commissioning often leads to overlapping and short-term initiatives that are limited in their ability to scale and sustain impact, meaning that residents of places like Stone and Leek have little autonomy when it comes to the decisions made about their lives.
Yet, this needn’t be the case.
For organisations like All the Small Things and Asist Advocacy, ensuring solutions are created with (and not for) communities is embedded in their approach, as is the person-centric nature in the work of Emmaus and The Beth Johnson Foundation. Then, there’s the holistic consideration of value by Counter Community and VAST.
All helping provide a much richer picture of what’s important to the people in the places we’re here to serve, the economics of people’s lives are only one part of a bigger picture. The question is, why aren’t community perspectives being considered?
On the back of conservative MP Danny Kruger’s Levelling Up Our Communities report to the house of commons — recommending placed-based responses based on levelling power between local government and the communities they exist to support — UnLtd’s Resilient Community undertook a six-month project to understand the gaps between the two.
Working with social impact consultancy Noisy Cricket, the community explored the barriers to investing in community-led, root-cause focused and sustainable solutions. Interviewing local government leaders, VCSE organisations and representatives from local communities, the North Staffordshire collective of social enterprises found that:
- Limited cross-sector engagement is underpinning the break down in understanding of what communities need or the services local government have to offer
- Framed by hierarchical structures and ring-fenced power, local authority interventions are viewed as uninformed, reactive and short-term in nature
- As a result, communities perceive local authority interventions as disingenuous and limited in their impact, leading to community apathy and disengagement
- For local government, however, some of the barriers to engaging, with social enterprises in particular, centred around concerns regarding sustainable impact
- Understandable, when local government find the VSCE sector difficult to engage with, and struggle to see the value and worth of social enterprises,
- Validating concerns of an economy-first and corporate mindset within councils, the VCSE sector flagged the insular and risk-averse culture that emerged as a result
- Yet, both communities and local government agreed that, in working openly with communities to address their issues, it’s often VSCE organisations who best understand community need
- in working openly within communities, all groups VCSE organisations that best understand the needs, challenges and aspirations of the people they support
- However, with no one groups asking questions of or seeing the value offered by the other, there has been a breakdown in place-based trust
With the ambition of effectively and mutually addressing the issues holding back left behind communities like Stoke-on-Trent, and creating value for everyone living in such places, UnLtd’s Resilient Community have been working together to shape a vision and strategy that will help bridge the divide.
The Approach
Recognising that the places we live in are all our responsibility, the UnLtd’s Resilient Community are exploring how we might collectively invest in better futures for North Staffs communities, and through holistically understanding need — both cross-sector and in communities — there is potential to build mutually beneficial solutions and many, many more of them.
The first step is to measure value holistically — including but not exclusive to economic outcomes — which every sector, organisation and citizen has a part in shaping. Then, exploring how we best understand need — focused on the issues that our communities see as the priority — and use that insight to better inform decisions and solutions.
Better understanding where value needs to be created, and the challenges that need to be overcome to achieve it, through co-producing solutions (as opposed to assuming what will work and commissioning it), we can collectively improve the likelihood of initiatives achieving the outcomes every party has agreed.
Reducing commissioning risk for local government, enabling more impactful and sustainable outcomes for VSCE organisations and improving the capacity of local communities too, the “Invested Communities” model means the people of Stoke, Burslem, Tunstall, Fenton, Longton and Hanley and the wider North Staffordshire conurbation are invested in shaping their own future too.
Shifting the culture of distrust in communities and empowering the people who live in them won’t be easy, but to reshape the structures that are contributing to the towns and cities of North Staffordshire being left behind needs everyone to come along.
In a world where the pandemic made our lives local again and we’ve been forced to go slow, taking the time to invest in our communities is the only thing that makes sense
The Invitation
UnLtd’s Resilient Community in North Staffordshire will bringing communities and the organisations that support them together with businesses and local government, working to explore how we might collectively shape the Invested Communities model in late April 2021.
Join us here.
