Using what's strong to fix what's wrong

Bristol City Council “One City” Gatherings

Warm Welcome Campaign Director David Barclay reflects on the power of communities.

Recently I had the pleasure of listening to Jon Alexander, author of the bestselling book Citizens speaking at a One City Gathering in Bristol. His argument is that to tackle the problems we face today, we need to rediscover the power of people not as subjects or consumers but as active citizens. It’s a compelling call for change, and one of the phrases that he used particularly stayed with me, which is that we should ‘start with what’s strong, not with what’s wrong, and then use what’s strong to fix what’s wrong’. 

In a world full of ever growing and ever more complex problems, we can come at things with an implicit deficit mindset and then try to design solutions to ‘meet needs’ or ‘fill gaps’. What we should be doing instead is identifying individual and collective strengths, and then making the connections necessary to enable those strengths to be applied towards the issues we are facing. 

It struck me listening to Jon that this approach is a key part of the magic that makes the Warm Welcome Campaign work. I remember in the conversation that led to the creation of Warm Welcome three years ago we had lots of discussion about the problem of the cost-of-living crisis and what that was going to mean for low-income families during the upcoming winter. 

But what transformed the conversation was when someone from the Salvation Army piped up and said: ‘We’ve got 650 centres across the UK – they’re all going to be open this winter, they’re all going to be warm and welcoming – how can we make sure that people know about them?’ 

Recognising the huge assets that already exists in terms of community spaces and thinking about how we could connect, resource and champion them was the launchpad that started the Warm Welcome story.

When I look at our network of now 5,300 registered Warm Welcome Spaces across the UK, I am constantly struck by the reality that these places and the people who run them are the absolute best of us. They are beacons of connection and belonging, full of unlikely heroes keeping the show on the road and serving their neighbours. In the words of our Founding Patron Gordon Brown, they are a chain of hope. 

And what I am also constantly struck by is how this ever-growing network of community assets could be used to tackle so many of the biggest issues facing our country. I have also recently had the pleasure of presenting to the Community Resilience National Support Group, which brings together disaster preparedness experts from across the UK. 

In that conversation, people talked about the government’s plans to increase defence spending at a time when many other budgets are being cut, and how the Strategic Defence Review is likely to emphasise whole of society resilience as crucial to our efforts to build a strong country in the face of growing threats. 

It suddenly crystallised in my mind that Warm Welcome has the opportunity to work with these Resilience experts to try to funnel just a tiny proportion of that defence spending towards a massive upgrade in disaster preparedness across thousands of community venues in the UK. 

At the same time, we are in conversations with partners such as the Jo Cox Foundation and the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government about how Warm Welcome Spaces can become Common Ground Centres – places of excellence in bringing different communities together and championing social cohesion in an age of division and disinformation. 

We are also talking to partners in the NHS and the wider health system about how Warm Welcome Spaces can be at the vanguard of creating a genuine Neighbourhood Health Service and advancing the preventative health agenda. 

What all of these conversations come back to is the fundamental point that to fix any of our big national problems, we need to be investing in our social infrastructure, and in using what is strong in our communities to fix what is wrong. We at Warm Welcome are ready and excited to play our part in helping to make that happen.

- David Barclay

Orignal article: https://www.warmwelcome.uk/blog/using-whats-strong-to-fix-whats-wrong