Who can be trusted to develop us? Yes, we the people. But local Trusts have been strengthening communities for decades. Covid-19 shows it's their time
A/UK’s co-initiator Pat Kane did an online Zoom webinar for Development Trust Northern Ireland (DTNI), at 11am, 13th May, titled “Trusted to Develop Us? How Community Development Trusts Can Respond To – and Thrive In – Our Current Crises”.
Full video of the event is above. Here’s an embed of the slides of Pat’s presentation:
And below is a short essay by Pat which carries the force of his argument - which is that past, present and future visions of community strengthening can come together, faced with the challenge of Covid-19.
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As pandemics historically do, Coronavirus has widened the cracks that were previously hairline, or just papered over, in our societies and economies.
When we start to return (for however long) to our streets and thoroughfares, we’ll begin to notice some of the gaps immediately - in shops and establishments, some long-standing and beloved, shuttered up and closed down.
The destruction of standard economic value caused by our response to Covid-19 - a third of our whole economy projected to be lost, taking us back to 1990 levels of wealth - will be there for all to see.
Activists everywhere are trying to suggest that we aim at a “bounce beyond”, rather than a “bounce back” scenario. This means pushing to the front a sustainable, regenerative and resilient socio-economics - of which there are many long-standing models.
This is a better option than seeking to return to the status quo ante. Which the Crash, Brexit, Extinction Rebellion and Greta Thunberg would all have told you, was hardly a shimmering ideal of well-managed, responsible economy and democracy.
So how does the shuttered restaurant become a community kitchen? How does the old shop front become a social action centre? How does a collapsed shopping centre become an indoor park or farm? In short, how can the ruins of one socio-economic model become the seedbeds, the “development boxes”, for the next system?
The answers here depend on where you’re looking for the forces of change and resources of hope. And how wide (and how far back) you’re willing to go.
I am delighted to be presenting at a virtual webinar for DTNI (Development Trust Northern Ireland) next week, on 11am, Wednesday 13th May (click here to register), where I’m representing both The Alternative UK and Common Weal (where I’m a board member).
But in preparing for the event, I am so struck by the history and legacy of community empowerment, not just in Northern Ireland but throughout the UK archipelago. There are decades of initiatives that decided to start with those who have least voice and power in any situation, aiming to place solid assets (and the skills to manage these assets) to their hands.
What is fascinating is the way that those assets - usually land and buildings, but also food, energy, training and cultural services - sit in an unusual relationship to both the state and the marketplace.
A “Trust” structure is a very particular legal entity, not all of which these projects are. But it’s the assiduous building of relations of trust (small t), with the communities who use or work these assets, which is the most relevant (and powerful) factor. A sociable web which can perhaps be leant on, or woven stronger, when the hardest of times descends.
For example, DTNI friends told me of Inner City Trust in Derry, It begins in 1976 restoring bombed-out sites in Derry city centre to use for youth training; it ends up in 2020 as a not-for-profit holder of hotels, galleries, design centres, museums, craft villages and residences, providing considerable levels of employment and community support in the area. (A similar trajectory was followed by Coin Street in London, beginning in the sixties as a popular defence of the OXO tower from developers).
These “Trusts”/trusted institutions in local communities build their credibility with locals from their long-term management and development of the physical and social assets at hand. I’m very interested in the distinction that seems to be made in the sector between “stewardship” and “ownership”.
What ethos, practices and structures safeguard the former - which sees itself as protecting these assets for the benefit of future generations in that place? And wards against the latter - where projects are wide open to more exploitative, short-term uses?
The answers to these questions will be useful to those coming from quite different sectors than economic development. Environmentalists and digital activists are also interested in the securing of assets for communities. In the last decade, both of these sectors have converged around the challenge of what it takes to build and defend a “commons”.
The greens, inspired by the work of the Nobel Prize winner in Economics, Elinor Ostrom, argue for commons as a way to preserve and sustain rich natural reserves. But the key issue about a commons is that it actively enlists communities in maintaining it - otherwise it’s not a commons.
“Commoning” is a verb, as many put it: a way of being, and a mode of action, that doesn’t leave the quality of a shared asset to either the vagaries of for-profit commerce, or the control of an administrative state.
The hackers and open-source coders are also interested in the construction of commons. These arise from the way digital objects can be so easily copied and pasted, escaping copyright restrictions on their use.
For them, joint voluntary endeavours (like Wikipedia) or giant respositories of useful code (like SourceForge) are commons that make software useful for citizens in society. Yet like the greens, they realise that you need a strong culture of constructive, responsible behaviour amongst the community of users, to get the most out of these resources.
How does such “commons” thinking drill all the way down to our high streets, communities and commercial clusters, blasted by the impact of Coronavirus? My own suggestion is that the Trusts, cooperatives and other organisations in this zone reach out to the greens and the digital actvists (many of them are featured in the pages of the Daily Alternative, our news-and-views services at the Alternative UK).
They are full of ideas and tools. Whether they’re proposing new forms of local credit, currency and banking, renewable energy networks, forms of cosmo-local 3-D manufacture or socially applied AI, or a broad range of other schemes… They’re all looking for real-world communities that might grasp tools that directly empower them, in the most modern and usable way possible.
This is another way where the past and future of community empowerment can meet up. What does a long-standing volunteer in a LETS scheme or credit union have to say to a blockchain expert, who believes they can really make a local digital currency system work?
What could a bioregional designer, who can see a vision for a locality that could produce forms of employment but also carbon drawdown, be saying to a neighbourhood forum or stewards of a trust about their next stage of local development?
It’s very clear to us at the Alternative UK - with our slogan, “if politics is broken, what’s the alternative?” - that we have to convene new and different actors together, within and across localities, if we are to return power to community life on these islands.
Yet there are contradictory strands blowing from top-down politics, which we’d do well to note. On one side, we see the looming spectre of “Whitehall knows best” raising its head again, this time turbocharged by big data and “clever weirdos” from Dominic Cummings’ office..
Yet such is the power of localisation as a trend that government-funded entities, like the Big Local, push in the opposite direction. They’re really clear about how resources placed in the hands of communities are often best spent securing physical assets, which can survive the vicissitudes of funders and political regimes (see this paper).
But in this presentation - made for an organisation defining itself as interested in “development trusts” - I have deliberately played with the concept, and turned it round. Who do we “trust to develop us”? Of course, and first, the citizens of any community themselves.
But what is the facilitating role of those actors and organisations who have been concerned to strengthen communities and their assets over the last few decades? Who can they open up their arms to, coming to them from surprising new sources? And as we all begin to realise how much damage Coronavirus caused, can they step up to help transform a fractured old order, into the community-based platform of a new one?
To sign up for “Trusted to Develop Us? How Community Development Trusts Can Respond To – and Thrive In – Our Current Crises”, at 11am, 13th May, click here on Eventbrite to register, free