From scanning the keynote speakers at the New Local conference, we’ve found an amazing force of nature sweeping in from Manchester - the community builder Ruth Ibegbuna.

We covered the opening of her youth-designed educational initiative Rekindle, with a post in May 2022 here, which we see is expanding from Manchester into Scotland and London. Their commissioned report on comparing Rekindle to other supplementary schools across the world is fascinating.

Ruth’s other projects are frontline:

From the Reclaim site, download manifesto

Above is an image from Reclaim’s youth-written manifesto for the Manchester mayoral candidates to consider. In Reclaim, there’s a refreshing focus on giving “working-class” youth a voice, and they helpfully provide a definition:

Working-class means different things to different people but for us at RECLAIM being working-class is characterised by a few key factors:

You're on, or grew up on, a low income with limited access to wealth.
You don't have many family connections to people with well paid, professional or powerful jobs.
You find it harder to 'fit in' in middle-class spaces, interests and conversations.
You're proud of your background and want people to see it as a strength, not a weakness

While working-class people have many of these things in common, we're a diverse bunch too. Working-class people are white, black and brown, LGBT+, disabled, recent migrants or refugees or from families who can trace their roots in the UK back generations, of various religions or none, women, men and non-binary. We're many things but we share the experience of growing up facing those four factors above.

They’ve also written a recent report on how working-class young people are missing from offices in the charity and think-tank sector.

The above graphic illustrates Ruth’s most ambitious project - Roots Programme. This sets up encounter spaces between members of communities otherwise kept far apart from each other - for example, between state and independent schools. As they write about their “Roots Futures” (click here for full programme):

Our unique programme brings together young people and teachers from state and independent schools across class, cultural, racial and religious divides. Co-led with young people and teachers, participants have space to build their own voice, character and ideas in learning alongside and from each other. In coming together, they will tackle prejudice, build connection and belonging, discover confidence and pride in their backgrounds, further develop critical thinking and communication skills.

But as you can see from the graphic above, the ambition to bridge disconnection between communities in the UK is ambitious.

We are always interested in people doing this kind of work, as the tragedy of Jo Cox’s murder was our founding moment (her legacy kept going by means of the More In Common initiative).

Rekindle, Reclaim, Roots... From her Manchester base, Ruth Ibegbuna aims to bridge class, social and cultural divides in the UK