Meet the menders
Our social fabric is frayed, so who’s fixing it?
For a while now, there’s been a growing consensus that Britain’s social fabric is dangerously frayed, and we need to invest to repair it. This has now become a fully-fledged movement, visible in everything from Andy Burnham’s rise to the premiership to recent interventions from Gordon Brown arguing that we need to fight our way out of a ‘civic recession’.
In much of this debate, the emphasis has been programmatic — focused on funding pots, local projects, or government programmes. Less attention has been paid to the people who do the work of civic renewal, in communities across Britain. This partly reflects a Whitehall bias towards the tangible stuff of capital projects, over intangible questions of skills, disciplines, and practices. Even Pride in Place, the government’s flagship programme for community-led renewal, requires that most of its budget be spent on capital projects, from filling potholes to laying pavements. More generally, it reflects the classic legibility bias: governments struggle to value the work of repairing and reactivating communities because it is hard to see and define. Everyone knows what a teacher does, or a brain surgeon, but what about a community steward?
Today at Kinship Works we’re launching a major new effort to help remedy this. For the past few months we’ve been working with support from Joseph Rowntree Foundation to map the disciplines of civic renewal. We’re publishing the results in a Discussion Paper, Meet the Menders. Through interviews with practitioners, visits to community-led projects across the country, and desk research, we’ve tried to get specific about the work people are doing. The report includes a typology of the disciplines of civic renewal, a systematic assessment of the support available to practitioners, and some recommendations as to how this support could be improved.
A rich field — but uneven support
In the report we’ve described a typology of 15 disciplines, organised into six categories. The full typology is set out in the report but in summary it ranges from more familiar disciplines, like community organising; to more established disciplines, like peace-building and bridge-building, which are now being applied in new contexts; to others, like community stewardship or institution rewiring, which are newer and often not yet codified at all.
In the report we describe each discipline with a brief pen portrait, trying to be as precise as we can while also not intending to start a war of definitions. People will each have their own ways to describe the work they do, and it goes without saying that we can kill this work by forcing it into boxes. Much of the value of civic practitioners, from peer connectors to community advocates, lies in the way they roam across boundaries. When people are working on the ground to repair social connections, or build community agency, they are not taking orders from on high, or from within a professional silo, but from what Mary Parker Follett called “the law of the situation”. So we see our typology less as a set of rigid categories and more as a series of patterns.
Why bother trying to describe these disciplines at all? In part because it’s hard to value work that you can’t see or name. A recurring theme in our interviews was that community-led renewal often gets bundled in with other work, as an afterthought. It is done by a community project manager who also orders the toilet rolls, and it is the first thing to be cut when budgets are tight.
We also see value for practitioners themselves, helping to situate their work in a wider movement. We hope this might help to combat the sense, which we heard from many interviewees, that this work is lonely, and it is harder than it should be to learn from peers.
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In this same spirit of wanting to back the people doing this work, we have mapped the support available for these disciplines today. In the report we map five dimensions of support for each discipline: how far the work has been codified in frameworks and role profiles; the institutions that exist to support practitioners; the availability of training; whether there are vibrant communities of practice; and the depth of academic underpinnings.
We find that support is very uneven. Community organising, for example, scores highly across all five dimensions. It has a deep history, established training routes, well-developed communities and institutions, and an academic literature of its own. This is very different to disciplines like institution rewiring, or community stewardship, where people often struggle even to describe or get permission for their work, and have no easy way to learn from their peers, and no routes to professional development. We notice that support often reflects historical patterns of funding, rather than a more intentional agenda of field-building. Peer connectors, for example, are well supported within the NHS but not outside, while peer researchers have strong supporting institutions in mental health, but much less so when they work in other areas.
Having said all this, we also recognise risks in trying to bring definition to a field that is ultimately organic in nature. It is all too easy to think of these disciplines as nascent professions, assuming that the goal is to ‘professionalise’ the work over time, much as institutions like Royal Colleges, or accredited qualifications, saw disciplines like midwifery or teaching become professions. We don’t think this should be the goal for the work of civic renewal. While it might be right for some civic disciplines to develop formal support structures — accredited training, for example — others will want to stay informal. Indeed many of the skills we see people applying in community-level work are tacit, and hard to write down. The best way to support this work will often be not through formal routes, like qualifications and codification, but through more informal and social routes, such as by building thriving communities of practitioners.
Recommendations
Where does this take us? Stepping back, two things feel clear. First, there should be a more determined effort to support the disciplines of civic renewal. It cannot be right that so many skilled practitioners, doing such vital work, so often have to go it alone, designing their own training from scratch, and lacking peer communities to learn from. Second, it would be easy to make things worse by pushing this work down a path of professionalisation. We need to support the work better without tangling it in a bureaucracy of rigid codification, gatekeepers, and accreditation.
We think the way to square this circle is for civic actors to continue to lead on supporting this work, while more formal institutions, from government to large foundations, play a more active enabling role.
Within this, we think there would be value in civic organisations supporting these disciplines in a more collaborative spirit, on the model of a commons. By way of example, support materials, such as syllabuses and role profiles, should be published openly by default, under a Creative Commons licence, so that people can share and improve them. Major foundations, philanthropists, and government should support these efforts with a long-term settlement, providing funding, supporting strategic convenings, and seeding new institutions when needed.
At the heart of this settlement, we recommend that the UK government work with major foundations and philanthropists to endow a network of Civic Colleges. These would be powerful, independent civic institutions — sites of learning, rooted in places. They would be joyful spaces, full of hope and determination, where people can come together to learn the skills we need to rejuvenate civic life. We think of civic colleges as part of a proud history of similar institutions, stretching back through university settlement houses like Toynbee Hall, the mechanics’ institutes and the membership bodies of the nineteenth century. We imagine them housed in historic buildings, where this work has energy, or in places where it is badly needed, across the regions of Britain.
Alongside Civic Colleges, we offer a series of more specific recommendations. UKRI research funding should be opened up to support research-grade work taking place in civic institutions. The government should fund centres of excellence for enabling disciplines, like relational practice. Major foundations should provide multi-year funding for convenings and peer networks. And government should offer a route to more formal recognition for disciplines that want it.
We offer these proposals, like the typology itself, as starting points for discussion. There is no single way to define these disciplines, or to support them, and others will have their own views. Nonetheless, we hope this report contributes to an ongoing conversation. We would welcome the chance to refine these ideas and put them into practice with partners.
Kinship Works is here to help accelerate the burgeoning movement for civic renewal. See also the Marshall Plan for Civic Life, delivered in partnership with Demos. Our new resource for local Pride in Place areas, prideinplace.community. And The Centre for the Edge, in which we’re bringing together senior leaders from government with people leading innovation all around the edges, in local communities. If you’d like to work together, drop us a line. You can follow my writing on Blue Sky, Medium, or Substack.
