I am standing on a muddy patch of land nudging the Severn Estuary, in the company of an inspirational community activist called Mark Pepper. We are here to look at building work on what will soon be not only the tallest wind turbine in England, but a crucial source of help for people at the financial sharp end. Thanks to a deal with a renewable energy company, the electricity the turbine produces will be sold to the National Grid, generating funds that will be used to subsidise the bills of vulnerable people who live a five-minute drive away.
Pepper is one of the founders of Ambition Lawrence Weston, a grassroots community group based seven miles from the middle of Bristol. A decade ago, spending cuts began to eat into the few amenities that local people had, and he and a handful of others decided they had to act.
“In 2012, they closed our college,” he says. “By that time, all the assets were getting stripped: the swimming pool, the leisure centre … loads of stuff was haemorrhaging, services especially. So a group of us got together and said: ‘No one’s going to help us. We need to get off our backsides and do it ourselves.’”
The result has been a trailblazing experiment in community activism that now involves people in what Pepper calls “social infrastructure”: training, education, transport, youth work and more.
The ambitiousness of the community wind turbine is also reflected in plans for new local homes: in partnership with a housing association, Ambition Lawrence Weston is working on plans for 36 new houses, 26 of which will be offered for genuinely affordable rent, with the rest split between shared-ownership properties and selfbuild homes. “Developers come and talk to us, and they’re gobsmacked by the conversations they have,” he says.
For the past few weeks, I have been travelling around England and Wales filming a new instalment of the Anywhere But Westminster video series. The film ties in with this year’s Guardian Christmas appeal – a portion of the donations will be distributed to local groups by Locality, which supports community organisations. As the Ambition Lawrence Weston story suggests, it explores a subject that still feels rather overlooked: the multiplying number of community initiatives and organisations that have often been created as a last-ditch response to decline and neglect, but are now showing a glimpse into a potentially fascinating future.
Right now, of course, a lot of them are focused on ensuring that people survive this winter. That work has a sense of the kind of collective mobilisation and resourcefulness you might associate with wartime. Food is not only collected and distributed, but grown and cooked. Many organisations now ensure people have access to toiletries and clothing too, as well as advice about debt, housing and work.
A week after my trip to Bristol, I visited the Selby Trust in Tottenham, north London, which works out of a disused secondary school but will soon move to purpose-built premises. Its “food hub” – which is a portal into help with no end of issues – began in 2020, and initially helped about 13 households a week. Now, that number has increased a hundredfold. It takes both dedication and expertise to deal with a workload like that.
Beyond food, clothing and the kind of emergency help offered by “warm banks”, there lies a tangle of other provision that fills the gaps left by continuing austerity. When bus services are cancelled, grassroots groups often develop new community transport; if a library is threatened with closure, it may have to be run by volunteers.
I understand the anxiety that this stuff often triggers, about normalising the retreat of the state, and weakening the case for services being delivered by paid professionals. But what other option do people have? Besides, rather than smoothing over people’s grievances about austerity – the essence of David Cameron’s short-lived vision of the “big society” – most of the groups I have met have given the communities they serve an even louder voice: when they come together, people tend to get more politicised, not less.
Taking the long view, the best local organisations are modern successors to the miners’ welfare halls and working men’s institutes that preceded the welfare state, full of creativity and nous about how to operate in the most difficult circumstances.
An example: true to an age-old spirit of working-class self-help, a community initiative called Arts Factory serves communities at the top of the Rhondda valley in south Wales, and partly funds its work (which takes in food-growing, nursery groups, advice services and lots of activity focused on health and wellbeing) via an in-house graphic design business and a well-oiled operation that sells second-hand books on Amazon, using the talents of people with autism and learning disabilities.
If you hear a term such as “third sector” and picture cracked paintwork, rickety furniture and raffle tickets, this kind of social action points to something very different: it is networked, agile and enterprising, in the best sense.
Where might all this work be heading? Our endless crises mean that a lot of local innovation and energy is monopolised by the most urgent kinds of need. Inevitably, grassroots groups are faced with huge financial stresses, and the constant need to bid for funds and raise donations. But imagine if the people involved were able to concentrate a little less on hunger and poverty, and develop the kind of work they do in other fields, with dependable financial help from local and national government. They have an amazing amount to teach us about how to approach big modern problems that the state tends to leave untouched: loneliness, mental health, long-term unemployment, the kind of care that happens outside institutions. Grassroots groups often work as incubators for new small businesses. And, as that turbine near the Severn proves, they can also extend their work into sustainability and climate action.
There is also a story here about the right way to treat people. The market is interested only in those who have the money to buy what it offers. But even in the best times, how does the state tend to deal with its citizens? All too often, it presents them with a maze of bureaucracy, endless instructions to “listen carefully to the following options”, and impossible demands, placed on people in the most vulnerable circumstances. By contrast, if you work at local level and try to blur the distinction between providers and users, you may just open the way to the kind of provision that allows people to feel as if they are helping themselves.
This year has been stained by the worst kind of leadership: lies, ego-trips, lurches from one approach to another, and reckless actions based on abstract ideology. The community activists I have met, by contrast, have stability, knowledge rooted firmly in the real world, and a fierce drive to make things better. Therein lies something that has felt vanishingly rare this year: a real glimmer of hope.
John Harris is a Guardian columnist
The 2022 Guardian and Observer charity appeal is in support of grassroots charities working with people struggling on the frontline of the cost of living crisis via our two appeal partner charities, Locality and Citizens Advice. Donations can be made online by credit card, debit card or PayPal, or by phone on 0151 284 1126. Sadly, we are unable to accept cheques.
