Community spirit, community power: the big picture
In November 2023 we held an event at The Glasshouse, Gateshead, called ‘Community Spirit, Community Power’. Members of the GCB team gave speeches about their experiences, their work and their ideas. These blog posts are drawn from those speeches…
Conversations at the ‘Community Spirit: Community Power’ event.
From speech by Andy Crosbie:
Gateshead Community Bridgebuilders are an idea: That all of our lives are richer when our communities are strong, when they are connected, and when they hold genuine power. We want local people to have the opportunities, skills, and confidence to engage in making decisions that are going to improve their lives now and in the future. What we mean by that is we want local people to have a meaningful role in their communities as decision-makers.
We know that current structures inherently exclude and marginalise large numbers of people. Our work is about building participative models of community decision-making and supporting local people to feel confident enough to be part of them. Our work is about changing and extending who gets to participate in decision-making, and changing the ways in which decisions are made and power is exercised.
We have built a team of community bridgebuilders drawn from the diverse communities of Gateshead. This work has been in partnership with the Lankelly Chase Foundation for the last three years. Lankelly Chase has given us an annual budget. This team of local people is able to decide what the money is spent on in service of strengthening our communities.
We think that funding models need to change, that it is currently too hard for local people to get the small amounts of money they need to make their brilliant ideas happen.
In this blog series you’re going to hear from Bridgebuilders Zahra, Hakan, Eric, and Paul about the ideas they have brought forward from their communities that are already happening, as well as ideas and experiences from team organisers Vikas and Christine.
Our purpose is this: We are committed to building the power of Gateshead folk and their communities.
Here are our core principles; the lens through which all our ideas are developed and decisions are made:
We focus on bringing people who are usually excluded into decision-making.
Human connection is always part of the answer, whatever the question is – relationships are the lifeblood and the rocket fuel of this work.
We believe that everyone is different, and difference is strength.
We are led by listening deeply to people, asking questions rather than assuming we know what people need.
We go slow, maintain patience, and are prepared to try stuff without knowing how it’s going to turn out.
At the moment, we think decision-making sits too far from community. We want to change that by advocating for community members to hold meaningful power in decision-making processes.
We have spent the last two years experimenting with doing exactly this with our small team of 13 Bridgebuilders. It has been really hard, as many members of our team have never had the experience of making this sort of decision before. But it’s working and we’re very excited about where this might take us.
We have a dream for next year to bring lots more people into this work by setting up a network of groups across Gateshead who each get to make decisions over their own community budget. We also have a dream to set up a community wealth fund that is owned by local people, and where local people decide what the money is spent on.