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Inside TWCP: Improving Inclusion, Prevention, and Making Change – Almu Segura

I have always, one way or another been involved with working with people. Whether it was through my degree – doing performing arts, theatre in the community or with art organisations. I have worked in residential homes with people with dementia and schools to bring them together, as a teaching assistant with autistic kids, volunteering in City Farms. I have always wanted to work with people, to help them play, laugh, have fun and to have better wellbeing.

I am a local resident and founder of Nice Bunch CIC, a new community interest company that focuses on intergenerational projects to improve the wellbeing of local residents. Through working with residents and local parents, I came across the work TWCP had been doing. I often engaged with them by seeking advice for my social business and attended some of their other events. Most recently, I received a call to be the Lead on their new health outreach programme funded by OHID. I said yes! It is a great opportunity to work with my neighbours and their families. To make a better place for my little one and the little ones around me and the community, in general.

The Healthy Living Club is an inclusive 8-week exercise and nutrition programme for residents in Thames View and Barking Riverside. Primarily focussed on supporting five to twelve-year-olds, the programme is structured to work with the whole family supporting participants to live healthier lifestyles with the support of familiar local community groups delivering the activities and health practitioners.

I would describe the work I currently do as a journey where we are trying to bring funders, the community and the tools that we have; knowledge and expertise, together, to be able to create a healthier community. To improve inclusion, prevention and to even start changing policies.

My vision for Thames View and Barking Riverside is for the area to be a model for change that other cities/boroughs can copy. To show that active listening in the community can bring residents what they really need and can change policy. If we work together, we can create longstanding change. On a smaller scale, I believe in just doing small acts of kindness. Even if it’s just saying good morning to a stranger in the bus stop, even if you make a person smile for a small moment, this simple act can have ripple effects that can help creating a welcoming and nurturing community.

Almu Segura

Director blog June 2022 – Warm, Cosy Spaces

We were chatting at the corner of Thames View fields and the pathway to Thames Road. About thirty of us, one sunny Friday in March this year. It is a regular thing we do, walking from the Big Shops on Farr Avenue to the banks of the Thames, by the developers’ prefab offices. We walk and talk. We look around, absorb it all, open ourselves up to the overload. Stepping across the landscape of housing, roads, warehouses, schools, more housing, more roads, buses, vans and lorries. Walking, talking amidst the hum of wider movement on building sites and lives being lived.  

It is not just a social. We are researching. Asking what kind of spaces people wanted in the area.  All the building going on, housing units by the thousands, but yeah, what kind of spaces would you like for your community? Answer: cosy, warm spaces. Someone said it just like that and everyone immediately agreed. That was exactly it. The craving for togetherness, for spaces we can call our own.   

We’ve got a few community spaces but how are they working out? Are they places people want to go to? The group spoke about yesteryear, about the cinemas Barking used to have. About the fields and horses before the development. Each person taking turns spontaneously sharing memories. All the while the cranes on the skyline marked out remorseless inevitable changes.   

The arrival of 50,000 new homes in the borough, many of them in Thames View and Riverside, is impossible to really process, outside of the town hall or the top floors of Maritime House, Barking, home of Be First. How can you make sense of it? You can’t. The walk we did, makes sense in a different way, via the senses and feelings evoked. Looking at the pressures on existing spaces, the busy roads, the construction, people reflect on what they want and conclude: cosy, warm spaces.   

Another way of saying it is, people want an experience of community, not of estrangement.  Places of their own, where they get a say. Cosy, warm spaces. I love that, so simple. So clear, because only residents can truly get to decide what is and isn’t cosy and warm.   

I’ve been walking around Thames Ward, now Barking Riverside and Thames View Wards with groups of people, residents, visitors. Just walking and talking. Typically, I get to the end of a long week and get a Friday feeling, especially when the sun is out, of needing to decompress. When people ask me about the area, there’s so much to say, too much for soundbites. It needs to be experienced, absorb the changes that are underway – the HGVs, the people pouring in and out of schools, the warehouses and businesses, the ever-present building sites, pylons.   

If you do our walk you will end up by the river, the much-referenced riverside or view of Thames View, but you’ll have to dedicate a couple of hours for that, as we always start at Bastable because that way people get to experience the old and the new. The phase one housing units of Riverside rise like small teeth on the skyline from across the Thames View fields – the locals call it toytown. Different from the typically more spacious Thames View housing that was built on rafts because of the marshy nature of the area, so marshy that even now, mosquitos predominate over the summer and netting is required for many newer residents.   

There’s a new Amazon on Thames Road, a Lithuanian beer company, cake shops, so many businesses clustered in one place. Ripple Nature Reserve spanning the bottom end, with entrances padlocked so more recent visitors have never experienced the unique ten-hectare site, once a dumping ground for pulverised fuel ash, now a mixture of woodland, scrub and grassland.  We usually access Riverside via Crossness Road because you can see the exact point where Barking Riverside begins, a private estate. One side of the road is in disrepair, the other considerably neater and tidy, the side where resident’s pay council tax and a service charge.  Then the housing units with wooden cladding begins. We see small ponds with ducks and approach De Pass Gardens, site of the Barking Fire in 2019, where the cladding on that building has thankfully now been removed, if not yet elsewhere.   

The Rivergate Centre marks another stop-off point, a multi faith centre with a Christian Cross on the outside. Where Friday prayers takes place in corridors. A co-op alone in one corner providing much needed supplies for those that can’t reach larger supermarkets the other side of the A13.  There’s still a way to go to reach the river, another busy road to cross (River Road / Renwick Road), but once joining Fielders Crescent, there is a short footpath from the road to the river and the view of the Thames spreads out for miles, past Dagenham and into Essex. From the roar of roads and density of housing everything opens up – big sky, river sweeping out to the sea.   

The end of the walk marks another special place – often quite windy rather than warm and cosy – but nonetheless uplifting. Once again people want to stand and talk about what it evokes. No longer a rat run to rush through but a place of solace to share and hold close. When urban planners talk about assets and place shaping this I know – it needs to be warm and cosy, and it needs to inspire a sense of awe.   

Change is the one constant in our lives. Nothing stays the same. Nothing lasts forever. Change refreshes and reinvigorates but can also leave people feeling unanchored, lacking roots. The property pages of the Evening Standard that I read on the way back from the walk tells me every housing development is the best there has ever been. From nine elms in Battersea, Greenwich Peninsula, Silvertown, Royal Docks.  Every corner of London in fact. Every square inch monetised. Money for advertising that props up free newspapers. Money that underpins planning decisions – they call it market viability. Money like change is double-edged. You can have too much or not enough. Money gives you control but it rarely creates warm, cosy spaces for all. For that to happen, we need communities to come to the party. The more community, the cosier it can be. The newspaper ads talked the talk; I wish they’d joined us, they could have walked the walk as well. 

Matthew Scott 

TWCP Director 

Director blog May 2022 – Barking & Dagenham Citizens

On the evening of Wednesday 28th April 2022 over 120 people gathered in Dagenham Town Hall (now CU London aka Coventry University) for an accountability assembly, a private event for member institutions and invited guests. Having listened to over 1,000 residents two issues rose to the top of our priorities: youth safety and the living wage, which formed the agenda for the night and our asks for candidates and speakers who represented the two parties (Labour and Conservative) that received the most votes in the last election, in accordance with the Electoral Commission’s guidelines.

The chamber reflected the diversity of the borough, as community groups, faith organisations and schools made their voices heard.  Unlike many decision making spaces it was full of young people speaking their truth, winning commitments from power holders. 

During elections, accountability assemblies function as platforms for community leaders to secure public commitments from invited candidates for an agenda that benefits our communities.  They are not hustings and are strictly non-partisan.  The vision is for an organised, healthy civil society holding the state and the market to account. Engaging in a non-partisan manner means we want to seek public relationships and commitments with whoever has power over the issues we care about. BD Citizens also sought to hold other non-political decision-makers to account, which included the NHS, the Police, and Transport for London.

When students from Coventry University spoke of the insecurity of health and social care workers employment the atmosphere was electric.  The heroes that got us through the pandemic work amidst constant threats of job loss and poor pay, we heard how that affected children and families.  It was heart breaking but also exhilarating as everyone recognised the burning injustice and determined, as one to insist on a collective demand for conditions to change. 

When the young people from Elevate Her UK spoke of their worries of assault, harassment and abduction, Superintendent Butterfield from the East Area Borough Command Unit, responded with a clear commitment to work together. The palpable sense of threat bearing down on young people who grow up not feeling safe demands action, including access to public transport all too frequently denied for arbitrary reasons. The aggressive way stop-and-search was done was challenged alongside the loss of youth centres without consultation.

I’ve been involved with BD Citizens since 2017, when Peter Hill, Bishop of Barking invited Citizens UK to the borough.  The funding from the Lottery for initiating Thames Ward Community Project was for a community organising approach and Citizens UK, of which BD Citizens is a local chapter, are the stand-out national leaders of this approach. I’ve learnt so much from them. They get right to the point. Involving those closest to the issues, to take the action needed.

We’ve done weekly leadership classes at Riverside School, led by Jamie and Zainab and the young people have won several campaigns including over £1m investment in buses and getting the keys for the Barking Food Forest site. Most of our trustees and all of our staff have done the two and three day training and come back buzzing. Fighting together for positive social change is contagious, in a good way.  Barking & Dagenham Citizens are in the area. 

Matthew Scott 

TWCP Director 

 

BD Citizens member organisations include:

Inside TWCP – A Flourishing Community – Lai Ogunsola

In 2018, my brother introduced me to Matt Scott, Director of Thames Ward Community Project, TWCP at an informal event in Barking. 
 
To provide some context. I had moved back to London from Birmingham earlier that year. I previously worked in the Public Health Directorate at Birmingham City Council as a Commissioning Support Officer, prior to my role at the Greater London Authority.
 
While working in Birmingham, I developed an active interest in community development and regeneration and was keen to learn more about possible developments in Barking. I had seen first-hand the positive impact that community development could have in communities from my involvement in the voluntary sector via Sustrans and other community groups in Digbeth, and Edgbaston. I had discovered Impact Hub Birmingham, which was a social co–working space that empowered residents to make a difference in the city. I was keen to see a similar approach adopted in Barking.
 
After speaking to Matt and Jamie Kesten, I learned more about the ambitions and ethos of TWCP. The project really resonated with me. I was glad to see a desire to engage constructively with the council and the developers, Barking Riverside London to improve outcomes for residents.
 
I decided to get more involved as I felt the project was a perfect match for my professional skills and interests. More importantly, I felt that my 20 years of lived experience as a resident in Thames view would allow me to provide insight, historical context, a genuine resident voice and practical suggestions for future work.  
 
My vision for Thames view and Barking Riverside is that of a flourishing community, with improved health outcomes and education/employment for residents.  
 
Historically, relatively high rates of unemployment, poor mental health, obesity, anti-social behavioural and a range of other health and social maladies have been an issue in our community. 
 
I have been exceptionally impressed with our joint work with Barking Council, and the local Clinical Commissioning Group, as well as our collective engagement with a wide range of partners, including the British Red Cross, University College London, The Bromley By Bow Centre, East London Citizen’s UK amongst others to address health inequity in the local area. 
 
Lai Ogunsola

Member of the TWCP Health & Wellbeing Citizen Action Group

Director blog April 2022 – Handwashing guidance – what to do when policies invariably fail? 

1. Palm to palm.
2. Right palm over left dorsum and left palm over right dorsum.
3. Palm to palm fingers interlaced. 
4. Backs of fingers to opposing palms with fingers interlocked. 
5. Rotational rubbing of right thumb clasped in left palm and vice versa. 
6. Rotational rubbing, backwards and forwards with clasped fingers of right-hand left palm and vice versa.

How do you wash your hands of something? Some bold ambitious policy statement that politicians make but then it fails as most public policy does. Try the above. Send out technical manuals so everyone knows what to do and can practice together.  

Seriously – most public policy fails most of the time. It doesn’t achieve what it set out to do. But read evaluations and corporate communications and everything has to be a success even when it mostly isn’t. All that is solid melts into PR. Residents were listened to, communities were involved at every possible stage, and everyone is deeply happy even when they are not.   

One of the questions I wonder about is why do we go along with the pretence? A kind of open conspiracy against social change. People seem strangely frozen within the institutions and communities. In Japan they say: ‘the nail that stands out gets hammered down’ and I’ve seen that response many times, close-up and personal. The standard response to community work that shifts power is to shut it down. Fear and spite is the flip-side of a paternalism and there is a lot of it about. I think it is more than that though.  

My sense is many of us don’t feel it could be any different. That any kind of change is not on the agenda. Although everyone has a voice most people don’t feel they can use it. There’s a vacuum that more unscrupulous transactional people seize but only because they are allowed to.   

If you don’t act, you will be acted upon. And mostly we don’t act decisively – things happen to us.  Those things are for our own good – everything that happens will be attached to a policy that is always and only a stunning success. So it goes. 

My solution: have an honest conversation. Ask questions and don’t accept answers. Always question answers. If something sounds too good to be true it probably is. Historically power is rarely or never given – it is taken. It is contested, argued over. It can be done amicably and lead to much better outcomes for all, but it means taking a risk.   

Issue / solution / action 

The only way to break free from policy failure is to keep asking questions. Questions pinpoint issues.  These issues become an agenda and an action plan. Having a plan and working that plan is about developing and testing solutions and taking action, over and over again. If you want change you have to take action and not leave it to others who have great PR but a disappointing track record. Part of our task is also to create the spaces where people can grow in confidence and self-belief to take collective action, to learn and work together in more authentic partnership. 

But it only works if you ask questions. You have to question if the person in control really knows what they are doing, if the policy is really working, you have to be willing to disrupt the present to claim the future. Next time you go to a meeting give it a go.  

 

Matthew Scott 

TWCP Director 

Inside TWCP: A Voice for the People – Romeo Murisa

Thames Ward Community Project represents an opportunity to give a voice for the people, by the people. The events held by them does more than communicate to building connections as it tackles challenges in a unique and impactful way with the aim to find a solution to the root cause of how the community feels.
 
I first got involved with TWCP by sharing a poem about mental health. The aim of the event was to help connect local residents and help facilitate conversations on the importance of social connection and the promotion of good mental health and wellbeing. This enabled me to share my talents and craft of spoken word, to help create impactful and meaningful conversations within our community. As a local resident, this was a space that contained individuals who share similar views to me but with a deep understanding of our lived experience. Hence, when an opportunity to be involved in the Arts and Culture Action Group with TWCP was presented, I was honoured to be given a chance to give back to the community. To give back through one of the most beautiful and readily available arts, known as spoken word. During this journey of working with the amazing team at TWCP, we have been able to achieve a milestone of creating an event for Black History month, which fused a vibrant palette of music, art, and spoken word. It was great to have written a piece for this to create conversations and hear the audience’s perspective.
 
As well as this, I have been involved in the fire safety action by writing three unique pieces that I have shared with the members and residents alongside the British Red Cross and the London Fire Brigade, to spark change and highlight our action points. I am excited for the end result for this one as it will help not only our community, but other communities that are at risk due to the lack of fire safety plans being put to action.
 
My plan for this year is to host writing workshops to allow everyone in our community to gain the ability to put what’s on their minds and heart to paper, because what is written is never forgotten. My ultimate vision is to support local residents that have a passion and talent for spoken word to gain their voice so that their stories can be heard.
 
Member of the TWCP Arts & Culture Citizen Action Group

Director blog March 2022 – The Body Keeps the Score

Trauma underpins our lives and our communities; it is hard to talk about and often talking doesn’t help, who wants to relive such things, but we carry it in our bodies and reproduce it in our behaviours anyway. That’s what I mean by ‘the body keeps the score’. We are lucky if we get through life without distressing experiences that injure us physically and emotionally. If we don’t experience it ourselves, we’ll know others close to us who have. 

We carry it in our bodies, but we also carry it in everything we do. It strikes me that community work and so-called ‘partnership’ working that seeks to address positive change, as opposed to maintaining existing inequality and power relationships, needs to exercise more care, because change is painful and is resisted.   

Trauma informed practice has six simple principles which if acted on would help: 

  • Safety 
  • Trustworthiness and transparency 
  • Peer support 
  • Collaboration and mutuality 
  • Empowerment and choice 
  • Cultural, historical and gender issues 

I don’t think our community and partnership spaces are always safe, trustworthy, transparent. Or that we have each other’s backs often enough (peer support). We compete rather than collaborate. There is compulsion in the workplace, not choice and we don’t talk about race, gender, class and other oppressions. Sometimes we create spaces for the above but not often enough. Because we live in the world as it is, not the world as it should be. 

Over lockdown I found myself thinking a lot about the world as it should be.

I was thinking about the pain in our lives and how it is telling us something. It can be redemptive; we can learn from it but mostly it just hurts and then we go numb, stuck, doing the same things and getting the same results. About love and how there isn’t enough of it in the world – in the absence of love, there is survival and how simply to survive is not to live a life.   

I thought about a recent situation that triggered me, where voices were raised. I don’t like being shouted at. It reminds me of a time in my life when my father would explode. He got sectioned. I remember social workers and police visiting. Questions being asked that had no answers. It just repeats. A year or so before lockdown my sister, who is autistic, got sectioned because the care home suddenly changed its staff and she literally started pulling her hair out. Social services answer was to put her into the same psychiatric hospital my dad spent time in. I then engaged with the health system my parents couldn’t cope with and it closed ranks. It reminded me that if you want change you need power; but that power without love is inhuman and love without power is anaemic, too weak. 

My sister is in a good place now and even when it was going on I was surprised at how calm I felt. I’d got used to that kind of thing happening. No big deal. Broken systems and broken people; I feel too much and then I feel nothing. I see how things get frozen. I try to remember to appreciate what is precious and focus on what it is possible to change, and that makes me happy. Sometimes.     

I’ve been thinking about how power is also about vulnerability. Trauma is caused when you are vulnerable and are powerless and overwhelmed so it is odd to say being vulnerable can also be powerful. How can that be?   

In that space of vulnerability we are most truly ourselves and from that space we can re-imagine what is important and worth doing in our lives. A lot of the things we do are probably not worth doing – the meetings we go to – the little competitive time serving rituals that divide and rule. Anything that can give a new perspective, new space to do differently, is worthwhile because when it comes to climate change, transformational public services, local democracy, looking after each other and being more human, much of what we do isn’t working and we can do better at every level. 

Matthew Scott

TWCP Director

Inside TWCP: Power to residents’ voices – Venilia Amorim

Having been an already quite active resident in the community – I joined the Barking Reach Residents Association committee as treasurer in 2016 – Tricia Zipfel, a founder and guardian of the Thames Ward Community Project, asked me and the association’s chair (Pete Mason) if we would like to be part of the interviewing process for the TWCP director’s position in the summer of 2017.

That’s when I met Matt Scott (TWCP director), back in September 2017. I posed hard questions, especially to someone who was new to the area. I wanted to make sure we got the right person for the job, someone who could establish a strong relationship with the local people, who really listened and actioned some of the brilliant ideas local residents had.

Since then I was quickly absorbed into TWCP’s steering board and never looked back.

I knew then – and I know now – that TWCP would be one of the most important projects for Barking Riverside and indeed Thames Ward as a whole. Important in developing residents’ skills, in encouraging entrepreneurship and engagement not only within the community but also with the wider stakeholders such as the council and the Barking Riverside estate developer, Barking Riverside Limited.

Living on the estate – I moved to Barking Riverside eight years ago – and in the borough (for a combined 17 years) has given me an insight of what is most important for residents: a safe and clean environment where people (young and old) can thrive culturally, financially educationally and socially.

Residents want safe and warm homes to live in, without the burden of inoperable heating systems or flammable cladding on walls. They want a consistent transport structure and shops and restaurants. Residents want a GP! One in which it doesn’t take months to get an appointment. Residents want parking spaces but want to be able to enjoy green spaces and clean air! Residents want good schools and activities for the wide diversity of residents as well as worship spaces…

Lots of wants… It’s not an easy task to be a town planner, that’s for sure! But it will be much easier with residents on board, actively making decisions on how best to shape the place they live in and will continue to live in for many years to come. I believe TWCP is a great platform for that. It has made great progress in already so many fields: arts, culture, nature, infrastructure, transport. And it will keep on going. It has and it will always have my support as a resident and as a steering group member.

My main passion is communication – I’m a journalist by trade – and I thrive in clear and open communication, ultimately by residents for the residents. This plays a hugely important part in my vision for Barking Riverside and Thames Ward: a place that is designed and built with local residents in mind, with their wants and needs as top priority.

Venilia Amorim

TWCP Steering Group Member

Inside TWCP: A Year in Post – Zainab Jalloh

Last week, it was my 1-year anniversary as Communications & Outreach Officer here at Thames Ward Community Project, and I couldn’t quite believe it. We choose jobs for a variety of reasons, but I remember vividly late 2020 hoping to take a risk to find a job that gave me time for family, and a job that was closer to what moved me, serving community. I believe in circumstances being timely and purposeful so when I was offered this role, even though changing careers was frightening, a smaller team more exposing, and the initial short-term contract precarious, I took it because it was what I wanted.

It has since been both challenging and incredibly exciting. I sit in my role as a worker but most importantly a local resident of Barking Riverside who emphatically wants to see our area thrive and people really be at the centre of decisions that affect their lives and TWCP exists for that. The heart of Thames Ward Community Project is residents coming together to create action groups and make change: Arts & Culture, Environment, Health & Wellbeing, Housing, Skills & Enterprise, and Young People, and comms plays a huge part.

I’ve been able to heavily support our Barking Food Forest project and seen how important sharing the journey of a project is in building momentum and engaging residents. Even whilst in lockdown, we created social media pages to share our ethos, co-design session plans, and more recently people getting stuck in at events! And I’m learning that that’s what people care about seeing. Real people, real stories, real community building. So my focus this new year is doing more of that.

As a team we’re creating spaces that promote honest dialogue with major stakeholders; the Resident Planning Forum, Community Resilience Project, the Healthy Thames Project, to get our resident voices a seat at the table. And a key vehicle for me to champion real stories is through our now resident-led, community newspaper, “Riverside News.” If you haven’t read it yet take a moment! This is us. The community managing green spaces, supporting local entrepreneurs, building resilience, enjoying street parties and getting behind our young people! We’re a little closer today it seems to having the community we are happy to have our children grow up in, but I don’t just want to sell you positive press.

I want us to have some hard conversations too and to make sure those get heard. At TWCP, I like that we’re not afraid to do that. I’m excited to spend more time this year getting out of my house and meeting you. Collaborating and creating impactful content that turns heads, and gets resources.

Zainab Jalloh

Communications and Outreach Officer at TWCP

Director blog February 2022 – #newpower – why outsiders are winning, institutions are failing and how the community sector will win the day!

The world is changing, faster than ever it seems.  I grew up without computers and mobile phones, without the internet – now those things define us, our data is mined and sold back to us.   

I was asked to lead on some group discussions with COMPASS, an independent think tank, on how the new power of tech impacts on communities and neighbourhoods.   

A new book had come out, entitled #newpower by Henry Timms and Jeremy Heimans. Books like #newpower try to articulate the zeitgeist, to explain why our times are as they are.  They have a big idea and even bigger hype so I am usually sceptical. The basic idea of #newpower is that for much of history things were straightforward – you knew who had power and who did not. But now it’s changing. For once the underdogs are winning. Just not always the kind of underdogs you might want. So as a community worker working in the community sector I know something about underdogs so I’m interested in changing the rules of the game.   

Evidence of this change might include the #metoo movement, Black Lives Matter but also ISIS and Q Anon. In the hyper-connected world ideas and actions spread very quickly and this can force change. How do we use that for good? How do we make it easier to do good?  The harm and downsides will be obvious, but this new world is coming ready or not. 

One of the examples I liked most was Lego, the company. It was in decline and had run out of ideas.  They talked to their longstanding fans and ran meet-ups for them over weekends where people indulged their childhood nostalgia but then soon ended up as an R&D arm, making successful products overnight. Lego in effect gave up control and handed over production and creativity to the people who cared most.   

See where I might be going here? Council – control – community groups – new way of working. What would happen if we turned local services and democracy inside out like Lego did? That is the kind of thought process the book invites. And more to the point, it illustrates examples of cutting-edge business practice that does exactly this, underlining the point that far from being fantasy it is sound market practice that larger charities and public sector organisations have yet to catch up with. 

What #newpower seeks to do is spread power much more widely to millions of people (crowds) and as much as possible, take it away from power holders altogether. Because power holders don’t have the answers or the insights and can’t grow anything. And now their power is flowing away from them by entrepreneurs who can code and activists who can tweet, video-edit and post.

In its better moments, the voluntary and community sector spreads power more widely and deeper. It was ahead of the curve in pushing power outwards and downwards when it remembered to collaborate rather than compete, in the pursuit of more equitable outcomes and a fairer world.   

The four group sessions we did included council leaders, former government ministers, charity CEOs, policy people and we had a great chat.  Mostly we didn’t talk about tech at all. We talked about how people behave to each other and how power changes that. The fear and cults of personality that so-called leaders promote. How large institutions create a culture that can crush people as a matter of routine.  We talked about our sense of déjà vu, of policymaking being doomed to failure because of broken promises.  The need for immediate ring-fenced money and buildings placed directly in the hands of communities, independent of anyone, in perpetuity (forever).  People spoke from the heart as much as the head so that was my criteria for a worthwhile discussion and hopefully something better to follow.  When it gets written up I’ll be sure to share.   

At the heart of #newpower is a vision of the world turned upside down. I’m not wholly sold on that.  I don’t think the underdogs are winning though some demagogues are gaining traction.  I’d settle for a more pragmatic view of partnership working and power shifting – where the top-down power holder can meet independent community groups and residents in the middle.  That middle ground does not come easy. But we can do much better than winner takes all; we can fundamentally change the rules of the game. 

Matthew Scott

TWCP Director

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