IMAGINE a partnership corridor…or golden thread… of community led spaces that runs right through the heart of Smethwick, reaching out to and run by their super-hyper-local* community.
From the Brasshouse in North Smethwick to St Albans Community Centre. On to ChangeSpaces at Holy Trinity Church to the Dorothy Parkes Centre, via Thimblemill Library, to Bearwood Community Hub to SMBC-run Lightwoods House. All of these centres connecting their partnership work with nearby organisations, small businesses, social enterprises and collections of individuals - faith-based, library-based, street-based and more. Making the whole greater than the sum of their parts.
IMAGINE these places working together to design a mammoth theory of change** which has plenty of room for super-hyper-local detail (totally possible) and is rooted in the research we’re collecting and contributing to.
IMAGINE these places working together and with local populations and agencies, to achieve the goals they’ve set out in that theory of change. Perhaps, collectively, those goals would be the things our community has already told us they want:
To achieve wellbeing and community wealth building outcomes.
To grow our resilience as a community and to design our own economic, social and environmental development through a community wealth building lens.
Working together to design and deliver health and wellbeing interventions.
To build a local advice network (see no.4 in this list).
To nurture new and growing social and private enterprises.
To increase the number of people who feel safe and secure in their homes, because they have the support they need when they experience domestic violence.
To build on our communities’ new-found abilities to be more effectively connected beyond social media.
To growing our literal growing by pooling our ideas and resources for the allotments, community gardens and park space that we are custodians of, to enable more equitable healthy food distribution locally and offering the health benefits of outdoor growing opportunities.
To try things in one neighbourhood area and easily replicate, by sharing learning and supporting one another, in another area.
To increase equitable access to initiatives like those listed above.
IMAGINE these places becoming more resilient and efficient as organisations as a happy result of pressures placed on us by Covid-19, because we are sharing HR expertise, admin support, venue-hire bookings, book-keeping and other vital functions.**
IMAGINE a couple of peripatetic roles across all the sites. A health and wellbeing activator perhaps, a business development manager or a social enterprise incubation mentor, a part time Smethwick Hubs network coordinator so the centres can get on with their day job while their partnership is supported.
IMAGINE Sandwell MBC recognising the value of a community-grown partnership like this that is hyper responsive to it’s local community’s needs. Imagine funders and authorities recognising the learning from the recent USE-IT UIA project which showed the power of bottom-up regeneration, in contrast with ‘how it’s always been done’.
IMAGINE, just for a moment, that sufficient investment was made to enable this to happen and for these organisations to get on and build their strength and income generation potential over multiple (5+) years, without having to chase ever-competitive funding over and over again, taking them away from becoming more sustainable and delivering what’s needed. This would mean capital investment into Bearwood Community Hub and Smethwick ChangeSpaces and revenue funding across the partnership to enable financially sustainable organisations. Imagine the outcomes we could achieve with (not for) our communities, activity and outcomes that have already been designed by those communities.
IMAGINE what we mean by sufficient investment. £1m, £1.5m? Big money perhaps, but not compared to, say, the £25m up for grabs for the My Town funding. We have no right over anyone else to that or other funds. But we can make a compelling case for how we would make it go a long, long way into a bright future.
IMAGINE if we had the resources to do a cost benefit analysis and prove the worth of this, we would. But we don’t, so knowledge and experience born from years of community work, debates, discussions and analysis of social media (our best dataset!), has to suffice for now. The future could be golden in Smethwick.
Anyone up for a discussion? We’re all ready and waiting if you are.
*The Covid-19 crisis response seems to be galvanising really effectively in some areas on a street-by-street basis, ‘hyper-local’ no longer seems sufficient for some reason
**A way of presenting, as simply as possible, the goals they are trying to achieve locally, the changes that need to be brought about to achieve those goals, the activities that will help to affect change and the organisational inputs/structures/resources that will help make those things happen.
***We are not suggesting becoming leaner to put jobs at risk: two of these centres don’t fully exist yet - Bearwood Hub and ChangeSpaces so there’s plenty of work to go around, perhaps even with these two ‘paying’ the others for shared services, financially or through other reciprocal arrangements.