The UK-based Neighbourhood Democracy Movement is building a media system, creating an inspiring world of can-do stories
Paul Wright of the Open Door Community Foundation, with their Street and Youth Connectors at their big summer event: “Having fun is such an important part of community life”
At the Alternative Global, we very much work with the presumption that most of the new structures and practices needed to make the transition to a more planet-friendly society already exist, but exist below the radar of our usual political concerns and rhetoric.
In this news blog, we often find that a social form we see a need for has already been prototyped or running well in its locale. Our job here is to disseminate this, and hope that it encourages more “fractals”—more evolving patterns—elsewhere.
The UK Neighbourhood Democracy Movement comes to our attention in a rich context - our own mapping of neighbourhood-centred community power initiatives, in particular India's “neighbourhood parliaments/neighbourocracy”.
But we also want to profile them as they are tentatively manifesting one of the structures we have anticipated in our “alternative news media” explorations - which is a news service driven by the activities of super-powered “cosmolocal” communities (or CANs as we call them).
Here’s their vision and intent:
What if neighbourhoods across the world could share knowledge and learn from each other to build powerful commons where they are?
It is possible to bring citizens together in commons to build power outside of dominant narratives and constructs that shackle and limit what can be achieved.
If the stories we tell ourselves and each other can make us sick then they too can heal, nourish and enable us to flourish. Let’s collect, connect and share them.
We can harness the stories of what's possible and what matters to mobilise and build out power in neighbourhoods – eclipsing the legacy of extraction from people and places and moving towards futures of healing, agency and care.
There are glimmers of this future already among us. The Neighbourhood Democracy Movement is nurturing an alternative vision by amplifying the stories of neighbourhoods, community connection and local democratic power.
What if we could demonstrate, through our stories and our relationships, that much of what we need for a just and fair future is already here?
What if we embraced the power of fun, connection and mischief to tell the stories of welcome, discovery and a just and fair transition?
We’re very struck that the NDM see themselves as capturing stories from local practitioners, then spreading their tales of good (and joyful) practice not just nationally but globally too. They do so with a news channel (“Stories and Updates”) from the localities (see grabs below), connected to mapping software:
Of course, there’s an “energy-in-energy-out” equation here. The degree to which this structure comes alive, as a connector and sharer of good practice, is the degree to which the inputs from initiatives/CANs are regular, relevant and enthusiastic. But we can’t deny that the basic structure looks very enabling.
Here’s an example of the kind of testimony the NDM is already generating, from someone “building community at the speed of trust in Firs and Bromford, Birmingham” - Paul Wright of the Open Door Community Foundation. And a crucial part of it resting on this abandoned dinner-table setting in the woods…
