Finding a common good in our divided society

Marc Stears, Director, UCL Policy Lab spoke to Citizens UK for a special edition of UCL Policy Lab magazine. Sign up for their newsletter here to find out more about Policy Lab and get the latest news events

Everywhere people gather - places of worship, at the school gate, on the shop floor - there are places for people to build connection with each other and begin to hold the powerful to account. UCL Policy Lab Director, Marc Stears, talks with the community organisers showing people how. 

I was first introduced to Citizens UK by a student of mine.  

About a decade ago, I was taking my undergraduates through the standard introduction to political theory course, at Oxford University, when one of them reacted particularly strongly to what had previously been a fairly conventional discussion of the relationship between community spirit and democracy. 

The student’s name was Stefan Baskerville and he had been doing some work outside his studies with The East London Citizens Organisation (TELCO), which was the founding chapter of what was to become one of the largest community organising networks in the world, now known as Citizens UK.

Stefan told me, in the unnervingly strong but polite manner that anyone who has ever met him will recognise, that I was thinking about it all wrong. 

His experience with TELCO, had shown him that the spirit of community and democratic politics are connected, he said, but not in the way that the textbooks standardly suggest.

Both community and democracy have to be built, block by block, through a slow, difficult and often contentious process that has to be led not by well-meaning politicians at the top but by people in their everyday settings themselves.      

The practice of community organising starts with building relationships. Organisers have hundreds of one to one meetings with people in their own neighbourhoods, building connections of trust, understanding what makes people tick and getting a sense of what change they believe is required. 

It can often then lead to more structured listening sessions, bringing local people together across the differences that divide them, so that they can begin to discover collectively what they have in common and what action they want to take.

Through this work, local groups - parents at schools, patients at hospitals, students and lecturers at universities, congregants and priests at churches - form alliances, identify who has the power locally to do something about the issues they have identified, and begin to build a plan to pressure them for change. 

It is a deliberate process, but one that has led to the most astonishing of political changes, from the call for a living wage that moved from the streets of East London to the Mayor’s Office, to a campaign to stop children from being detained in the immigration system, which was won at the start of David Cameron’s period in office but is under threat again now.   

Researchers from across UCL now work with Citizens UK on a host of issues dear to our hearts too. One area of particular importance is mental health. Recently, researcher Fran Zannatta, department head Peter Fonagy and UCL Partners Chief Strategy Officer, Jenny Shand, sat down with community organisers to learn about their work. 

During the lockdowns, Citizens in south London organised listening sessions by gathering people online and asking ‘what’s putting pressure on you and people you care about?’ then listening closely to their answers. One issue people brought up again and again was loneliness, isolation, and anxiety. This was exacerbated by the system for signing up for mental health treatment. 

Typically, once you sign up, you get a message confirming that you’re on the waiting list for treatment. But without much information about what you can expect or when, the wait itself can make anxiety worse. Miata Noah, a teacher, was part of the Citizens team who decided to pressure the local NHS Trust in south London to fund an online platform to show people how long they would have to wait and give them a mechanism to escalate the request if the issue got worse.

Another theme to emerge was low pay. During the pandemic, many found their work hours cut or didn’t qualify for furlough. Citizens coordinated a coalition of local parent and student groups to put this on the agenda of the local NHS Mental Health Trust. 

“We told them that if you want to do preventative work on mental health you have to tackle low pay,” explains James Blatchley-Asfa, Assistant Director at Citizens. In November 2022, at a specially convened assembly of 500 people, the chairs and CEOs of the local mental health trust agreed to formally recognise low pay as a mental health issue and start to address it.

This year UCL Policy Lab is also working with Citizens UK in Liverpool, where Citizens are starting a chapter for the first time. 

Lesley Penton, Partnerships Director at The Regenda Group, a housing and regeneration coalition, was surprised to find that a neurosurgeon from a leading neurology and neurosurgery centre in the city was keen to join the coalition. But it makes sense; community organising starts by building a strong alliance, and each new coalition member, from charities to neurosurgery centres, strengthens the coalition’s voice in the city. 

“When you’re just a small organisation, sometimes people in power don't pay attention, because there are louder voices,” explains Sara Lawton, founder of Thrive, a safe space where support workers work help care leavers plan their futures. “By forming an alliance with civic institutions where we can come together on common issues, we have more power.” In Liverpool the coalition includes churches, a mosque, schools, a university, the Salvation Army, and community groups like Thrive. 

“We really wanted to change the system,” Lawton says, “to empower those young people to have a seat at the table, which they don’t  currently have. So we can train these young people as community leaders and empower them to have a voice. So that they can eventually get to the point where they can ask in the right way, and campaign for the change they need to see in that system.”

It is an inspiring tale and one that reminds us all what democracy is all about.  

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Citizens UK is at https://www.citizensuk.org/

Liverpool-based organisations interested in joining the new Citizens alliance can contact Lesley Penton at lesley.penton@regenda.org.uk or Sara Lawton at sara@rise-framework.com

We spoke to Citizens UK for a special edition of UCL Policy Lab magazine. Sign up for their newsletter here to find out more about Policy Lab and get the latest news events