Bottom up Change

Nick Gardham: I'm a person who is very passionate, committed to social justice, social change and for me, I am also someone who's committed to systemic change and that for me is change which is informed, developed by people. Stephen Kearney: Change for us is absolutely at the heart of our work. Part of our strategy is to link people's personal growth with local action that in turn is going to impact on the whole country. Nick Gardham: For a long time government initiatives - initiatives on every level have often been delivered from the top, from the center. We need change to be in the hands of people, in their communities, in their neighborhoods. We need peoples to own that change, we need people to own those solutions. [Personal change] So Root Solution Listening Matters is about listing to people one to one. It is about listening in church halls, in their doorsteps, in pubs, in youth clubs, on the street, wherever people are at. What we are seeking to do in the listening process is to start to really understand and think deep about what people think and feel. Often we listen and we think we hear certain things but only through actually deep questioning and deep involvement in the listening process, do we start to understand what people are saying. So that we actually start to develop relationships with those people so that they actually then feel more comfortable and capable to bring other people together. And I think those relationships are really important because often there is a number of communities that feel marginalized. They feel that we don't have a true voice and no authentic voice which represents them. So we are going to help people to actually build that capacity and that voice. We are going to inspire them through the listening, to actually think about and reflect on their ability to influence and affect change. We are going to ask them about the things they really love about their communities and we're going to ask them about things they want to see change and see done differently. Local resident: Well, if they have a community center we can do like a toddler group, you know because people have to go into town, to go to a decent group. Nick Gardham: We are going to ask people what it is that concerns them, what makes them sad, angry, frustrates and worried. What their visions and dreams are for the future. And we're going to encourage them to do something about it. [Collective Community Change] We are going to encourage people to start to come together to explore these issues. We are going to come together in their homes. We are going to come together in cafes, in places where they already meet and they feel most comfortable. We are going to encourage them to think about if they can meet with others to actually start to explore the issues that affect them and then explore the actions that they can take to influence change. And we're going to help them to start to shape their ideas, help them to shape their projects and develop their thinking so that it can start to better meet the needs of their community and their neighborhoods. So we are going to teach them a way of networking, of building community networks, of building people that are needed in communities to bring about change. This network will help not only people to make a change at very local level. They are also going to develop a network of people and develop an information and power base through what people have been saying so actually interrelate with local government, local agencies and local institutions. And it is through the development of this community base knowledge that we will be able to then share with the agencies and the institutions to actually co-produce and co-productively deliver services. [Sustainable institution change] The importance of schools is crucial as key institution which can embrace change within the neighborhood. They can be the catalyst of actually creating the systemic change. Stephen Kearney: There is a completely different educational requirements at the grass roots of our community. And that's educational requirement that is about really helping people to motivate themselves into action and motivate themselves into learning but if we can link that to the educational establishment and the educational establishment understands the potential of this experiential learning, we have got something which is very very powerful. What we are calling for is a new dialogue between the state and the people but the thing is, in the last two or three years the lack of public funding and government cutbacks has started to mean that many local authorities and agencies are going to be ever more dependent on the interrelationship they have with the community. In order to reach out effectively to the local government, local government have to see that this is a serious piece of work so for example, if we are going to get this right, we are going to have listened to maybe 2, 3, 4 and up to 5,000 people. One person can do that by engaging others in the community to listen with them. In Swindon, we work with the localities team here and in three areas the teams are listening to hundreds of people in the community. [National large scale change] It is that project and the success of that project that helped us to secure a training contract with the government to train the 5,000 community organizers in Britain. The policies that emerge, must be rooted in people's thoughts and experiences so that when change comes about, when a decision is made, people recognize the reason why they should be engaged with it because it directly relates to their living experience. Stephen Kearney: So a great example would be Lauren who we listened to in mid Wales. She is very concerned about lack of opportunities and facilities for children and young people. She was a young person herself and some of her peers complained of abuse and neglect. She wanted to tell that story with them and so a number of them from right across the county set up the new power generation, a Theatre Company that was designed to really articulate the concerns that they had. Then it was all about how to take the concerns that they had to the politicians. So in Lauren's actions, really, she went through some kind of personal motivation to do it, she took the local action around the Theater Company, she spread that throughout Wales and then worked with people to set up a national voice for the young people.