Resource redistribution has been liberating and equalising
To centre communities rather than philanthropic folk would mean we would be so much better connected, and there would be so much better use of resources
By Angela Fell
Around the time of the pandemic, Greater Manchester System Changers was the movement of people Lankelly gave money to. They were trying to move those system changers closer to people who were more directly related to either the problems that were being experienced or the neighborhoods those problems were being experienced in. I think they gave £5 million to the region.
The resulting resource redistribution has been one of the most liberating, equalising things I’ve ever been involved in. Here in Wigan, we’re at a real significant turning point with the local authority and with the local power structures that would never have happened had it not been for this no-strings investment that enabled us to, first of all, complain about them.
We could say ‘no’ or ‘hang on a minute, that’s not fair’, or stand up for the resourcing of communities at a time when the charitable industrial complex was just feeding itself. There was a real, genuine and committed interest in working in a spirit of mutuality, rather than in that traditional charitable model. That breakthrough wouldn’t have happened without Greater Manchester System Changers. It wouldn’t have happened with lottery money, because we’d have been too busy writing quarterly reports and thinking about outcomes.
Consensus-based, shared decision-making
We were able to redistribute cash directly to organisations that were struggling or were seeking to do things differently. The parcel of funds is given to an organisation or community and then they decide, no strings attached, how they’ll proceed with it. We worked with people like Alice, who does furniture upcycling with women experiencing tough times. She chose to leave her job as a social worker because she didn’t think social work was doing what it should be doing.
Really what we’re trying to do is create this alternative system that takes the small grants decision-making processes away from the politicians in the centre and brings it back into the community through a consensus-based, shared decision-making process. That’s what Lankelly’s done: given us money and then we’ve given some larger pots directly and have through Grass Roots of Wigan been using consensus decision making processes to give out cash pots of up to £250. At the minute, we can now start sharing pots of up to £1,000.
Based on some of the things we’ve been doing and sharing the learning the Council has decided to explore the co-creation of a new infrastructure organisation for the community sector in the borough. The people they’ve asked to get it started feel really trustworthy. They are holding the money, and taking their time. It feels like they will be a good distributor and they are interested in using some of the same processes that we’ve become familiar with through GM System Changers. They’ve given Grass Roots of Wigan a small pot of money which has enabled us to continue for another year and increase the level of investment to £1000 for members.
It’s still quite radical to want to do this in the town. Many organisations don’t want to give money out to people, because they don’t necessarily trust people and they’ve become quite risk averse, even with small amounts of cash such as this. There’s a shake up in the town as some of the money that comes into the borough for the community sector is no longer going to organisations who’ve had it for a long time. It feels like space is being created to spread the resource rather than grow a few organisations who happen to be closer to power.
Breaking the drama triangle
When we started, the local politicians were giving us a hard time, and then that shifted because they just couldn’t do the level of work we were doing. Then it became the local authority, and that shifted because they began to see what we were doing. Wigan, as in the Council, seems really committed to it. The strategy from the local authority at the beginning of the pandemic was, ‘Ignore them, they’ll go away because we’re not funding them.’
We got told by many people at the beginning that you need to go and kiss the arses of the politicians. So for Lankelly to invest in something that enabled us to get out of the ‘drama triangle’ relationship with a local authority and say, ‘Let’s all be adults here,’ has been fundamental. We wouldn’t be here without them, even though there’s a bit of middle class allyship in the decision-making processes. In the grand scheme of things, that’s tolerable because it’s enabled so much.
Right at community level, the number of women and men who have stepped into doing things that they probably only dreamt of doing or didn’t think that they could do, and the ripple of that with their children, the sense of possibility, of there being an alternative narrative to the one that was “playing the latest tune”. That’s all been possible because we’ve been able to break the predominant narratives of the experts who were ‘coming round here to help you’.
We can get things going quickly. That’s what people want to see, really – that things are happening around here. In fact, a theme in our surveys and conversation groups this year was that people are seeing and feeling change. It’s not universal, it’s not everywhere, and it’s not massive, but there is a change around how people feel in terms of connection, the quality of information that people get about the area, and the number of things going on where people can come together. That is a felt experience, and that’s because we haven’t had funders that say ‘You’ve got £750 to spend on, X, Y and Z.’ We’ve just had a free and open budget and thought, does this feel like something good to spend on? Well, let’s spend on it.
Where next?
One of the things I’m trying to do at the minute is to get the people who are now responsible for the money that’s coming in through the region for grassroot communities to adopt some of the same principles, practices and processes. Straight away that disrupts the traditional way of thinking about how you’re going to use money and starts to build communities of people who are action-focused.
There’s not much money left now in Greater Manchester System Changers, and there’s no commitments of more money. But the network that’s been created is very much still around. Now the money’s gone, what is it that we still want to organise around?
It’ll be interesting to see what happens with this, because we’ve redistributed £350,000 between us to our neighbouring communities, I’d always seen my interest in the legacy being around having a grassroots network that redistributed cash. It’s why we set up Grow, doing it in a way that wasn’t big enough for the politicians to try to close it down straight away, but was large enough to really support things – to carry on growing. We’ve still got the infrastructure. If anybody wants to invest.
Holding property in the commons
There’s money coming into the region that might just enable us to secure the resource to buy a local pub. A fear about that is that I actually do want to retire – I don’t want to take on a building for the next 30 years. Anyone who knows me will laugh at that! I’m wondering though – How do we bring together a community of people who would be interested in this so that I could do a day a month on it? We’re not far from a community land trust, in terms of identifying people who would play that role.
We would then have some mechanism that holds any property in the commons. That takes the risk away from the local authority around transferring assets across, because it’s in the custody and under the stewardship of the community. I think over the next five years it’ll be interesting to see how the relationship between community and state grows.
I think we’re at the stage now in the local community where we can articulate what it is we can do well together, what we can do with support, and what we want others to do.
One of our neighbours, Middleton, is preparing this plan about the level of capital investment we would need in order to purchase and bring back into the commons buildings that have been extracted. Then matching that with a resource plan, so we have the people in place to manage that, to really think about landlording and community offers – do we actually want to fix drain pipes?
Back to community life
We’ve developed our community private members lottery in such a way that we’re actually paying for things ourselves. If we get 1,000 members, that’s £5,000 a month. £2,500 goes out to members, £2,500 comes into the community. We could keep a place going with that.
Local ownership is just another step in that direction: away from capitalism and back into community life. So much ripples out from it.
To centre communities rather than the philanthropic folk would mean that we would be so much better connected, and there would be so much better use of resources, and they wouldn’t need as many media people telling us about their organisations.
The depth and the breadth of the work we’ve been involved in over the last five years, and the size of it, has been fantastic.
Story Weaving by Peter Pula and Sam Gregory
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