Various rooms, full of Barking & Dagenham residents from every neck of this London borough have pondered this question over the past 18 months. They’ve also asked what could this scarf, Sellotape, coathanger, paperhook, post-it note and many other objects too numerous to mention be the solution to. But why?
It’s been part of an experiment to disrupt the way we approach issues we see, and open up a space where we define the issues that matter to us in our community, before starting to discover what the best solution might be – prototyping it by ideating, testing, failing, refining and trying again.
It’s been interesting and fun – not least because this initiative has been about residents leading, but also because of the international expertise of Professor Nick Tyler and Senior Research Fellow, Sara Adhita from UCL. Their willingness to apply their tried and tested methods, adapting them to help local people has provided a supportive framework within which people are discovering answers to some of the thorny local issues. So, in answering the tea-cup game, mindsets are turned away from pre-defined solutions, towards asking questions instead, and the answers have caused laughter, bonding and friendly competition!
‘Sounds nice, but so what?’ you might say, ‘Barking & Dagenham’s issues are never going to be resolved by a few residents…’ But the truth is, the committees and boards who are also trying to solve the issues, haven’t found the answers either. This prototyping approach resets who gets to be involved in exploring what can change things.
Back to the groups of residents. There have been some startlingly common themes that have emerged. Questions like ‘how can I feel safer on this road?’ [name your road]and ‘how can we connect people together in this neighbourhood?’ [choose your neighbourhood]. Along with some specifics such as ‘How do parents of [for example children with additional needs] feel included and confident?…’
Basing themselves in Dagenham Library (appropriately also named a Learning Centre), one group have persuaded shop keepers in the adjacent thoroughfare to display QR codes in their shop windows. The QR codes link to a map of some of the area’s ‘connecting places’. At the time of writing they’ve got 37,000 hits from local shoppers. No small feat. They’ve been asking local people where they go, and how they like to connect with others – and adding these places to their map. The group includes people with learning disabilities, dementia and low literacy rates, who wouldn’t have said they were part of a supportive community beforehand. Now members are in and out of each other’s houses; friendship has been a by-product of doing something together.
Another group are mums of children with additional needs. They started off by testing whether guest speakers would help them to feel better equipped with specialist knowledge. And, as you might expect, that has been a useful tool. But not half as useful as the friendship that has been deliberately cultivated amongst them. ‘We meet each other outside of this group all the time now’ says one. ‘I know so many people now, and when I feel like hiding away, someone will always phone me to ask where I am’. Another of the Mums is keen to assist other groups to develop their ideas ‘I never dreamed I’d be asked to facilitate this kind of thing’. She is helping another group of residents, with similar aspirations to refine their ideas now too.
We’re learning so much together. . For the facilitation team, one of the key learnings has been around money. It’s fascinating that those groups who have asked for £1000’s have struggled to spend it – it seems to somehow become a blockage. Those who have asked for smaller sums of one or two hundred have got on with their next step and learned from it before taking another.
I am very thankful to Cameron Bray from BD Giving for their guidance in how to facilitate participatory grant-making in this situation. Working with people to identify what behaviours are important to them, unearth the unspoken ‘what ifs’ and framing them into a safe space for groups to be able to question one another. Being able to discuss and agree what funding is appropriate to test solutions to issues in their neighbourhood seems vital to clawing the power back into the hands of our communities. It disrupts the notion of traditional funding where the power remains with the commissioning body, and moves us further into a discovery space, where we’re able to explore what’s needed, rather than putting all our endeavours into meeting KPIs.
Earlier in the summer we celebrated with all those who have taken part this far, hearing what they’ve learned – along with some of the people from the Council who took a chance with funding this kind of innovation. We’re immensely grateful to them. The interesting thing for me is the level of ownership, involvement, and power that this is starting to birth amongst some communities who are usually overlooked. And the levels of connection it is producing in a borough which has the second highest rate of loneliness in the capital. Considering the impact of loneliness on our health and wellbeing, if we’re brave, and hold our nerve, I wonder where this could take us next?
It leaves me wondering – what could 37,000 hits on a local map of connecting places turn into?