POWER AND PLACE
Rethinking the relationships between people, communities, and the places they live.
place work is about the people and communities that make up a place.
Yet most people lack opportunities to engaGe in decisions about the places they live IN.
Current social structures accidentally make many of us feel powerless – and these feelings of exclusion and powerlessness are felt even more acutely by people from disadvantaged communities.
In this age of metacrisis, Place matters because the local level is the only level at which people can feel a sense of genuine agency.
We began a partnership with the Lankelly Chase Foundation in 2020 focused on devolving decision-making power over funding to a place, in this case Gateshead (where Andy lives). This work has blossomed into the Gateshead Community Bridgebuilders, as well as throwing us deep into the world of Place work.
There are already a number of Place-focused networks and initiatives happening around the UK. Together with a number of friends and partners, we are working to stitch these together into a national place movement. We want to demonstrate why Place work is so important and encourage much greater investment in Place work than currently exists.
If you’re interested in becoming part of a national Place movement, or are involved in place work yourself and would like some like-minded people to share ideas and thoughts with, we’d love to have a chat!
Understanding power and place
Through our work so far we have learned that power and place is about:
Extending and diversifying who gets to make decisions about what happens in a place AND changing the ways in which decisions are made.
Supporting local people to develop the opportunities, skills, and confidence to engage in making decisions that are going to improve their lives now and in the future.
Facilitating people to build and maintain their own self-governance structures through their own power (not just relying on external ‘experts’)
Recognising and working through the complicated relationships we all have with money and how that plays out when distributing financial resources in a place.
Changing the ways in which money and resources flow, recognising that the conventional funding landscape is not conducive to decentralised Place work, and funder power can unintentionally impede the work.
FURTHER READING
MORE ABOUT OUR WORK WITH POWER AND PLACE
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An overview of our learning processes and discoveries so far in helping to support community based devolved decision making.
(20min read)
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