Local people are working together in Gateshead to build power and capacity at the heart of communities
Gateshead
Gateshead is one of the five places in which Lankelly Chase invests as part of its place-based inquiry.
Since initial conversations with Lankelly in Autumn 2019, we have gradually developed and extended our focus, learning more about the everyday lives and experiences of people in Gateshead, and deepening our understanding of the systems that perpetuate marginalisation and exclusion.
In July 2020, Gateshead adopted a devolved decision-making approach that handed decision-making authority for how to use Lankelly Chase funding to a locally-based group. The Gateshead Coordination Team (as it is currently known) emerged. This is a group that draws upon the varied experiences of people working across the Gateshead area from different sectors, organisations, and local communities to run ‘system change experiments’ where the focus is on learning rather than any specific outputs or outcomes. We have adopted a wide range of approaches aimed at better seeing and unpacking systemic inequalities, resulting in a number of projects/inquiries since this work commenced.
Rich Gibbons, Transmit Enterprise/Gateshead Coordination Team
Click on the ‘learn about the work’ tab to read on.
Gateshead System Mapping Inquiry
This has gathered over 110 detailed stories from residents of Gateshead to capture causality (how one thing often leads to another thing happening in someone’s life). We then transformed that nuanced, contextual information into ‘system maps’. These maps illustrate the complexity of issues people often face and how these underpin different challenges and obstacles in people’s lives. This is an ongoing project that is being developed and progressed by people with lived experience of such issues, supported by the Institute of Development Studies. The stories are now informing five groups set up around different themes that emerged from the system mapping process. The aim is to learn more about the damaging causal links that lead to systemic disadvantage, and what can be done to challenge them.
Gateshead Futures
This is a regular online learning and reflection session to give people the space to discuss things they don’t have space to discuss elsewhere, involving people from 40+ organisations. What are the things that people really want to talk about? What happens if you bring together people from an area for shared reflection free from agenda? This space looks to create a cohesive setting to develop relationships and insights that more traditional settings often cannot.
The Teams and Dunston Initiative
A partnership with the Ballinger Trust and the National Lottery Community Fund, allocating 200K to the neighbourhoods of Teams and Dunston for local people to decide to use as they see fit. We recruited a local community member to initiate conversations and try to unearth what matters to the people in these communities. By listening to people and including them in the process, we hope to better understand how we can create more power and agency in a local community through funding that helps people to realise their own ideas.
Community Bridgebuilders
We have recently developed a new role to fund 7 local community members to work as part of the Gateshead Coordination Team. These are individuals that are already active within their different communities, providing support for the kind of everyday issues that people often struggle with. We believe that communities that face barriers, disadvantage and marginalisation, should be involved in making change and taking action towards a better life for everyone. The role of a Bridgebuilder therefore involves tuning in to this and helping to make it happen.
The ‘Learning is a Luxury’ Inquiry
We conducted interviews with organisations across Gateshead, culminating in an event in January 2020. The aim was to understand how organisations in Gateshead learn, as well as what learning spaces currently exist in Gateshead.
Adult Social Care System Learning Group
This is a community of inquiry within Gateshead Adult Social Care, using reflective practice to explore issues in social care and the space to do things differently. Facilitated during the course of the pandemic, the purpose was to explore how we ensure we capture the learning that emerges through Covid, and to better understand what to do with what we learn.
The Signal Inquiry
Uses the Signal tool within local charities and across some of our other inquiries to promote wider collaboration. Can bringing local charities together to use the same tool help promote collaboration between them? Does having shared population-level data lead to charities behaving differently?
Media Grid
Gateshead systemic inquiry – action research for change
We are a group of people who live in Gateshead and who want to do something to make life better here.
We first came together to try to understand the issues and challenges that people face in our area – challenges that all of us might have experienced in our own lives. We want to help to stop the same issues come up over and over again for people in Gateshead. We want to make changes.
These may be changes we make in our own lives, changes in what local support organisations are doing, changes in what the local authority is doing, or other things we don’t even know about yet.
System mapping is the process we have used to dig beneath the symptomatic issues that we often get bogged down in when we focus on delivering services/support; poor mental or physical health, isolation, addiction, homelessness, etc. The reality is that underlying these issues are usually many contributing factors that shape how we experience life. These are found in our own stories; in the things people feel are most important in their lives and that they feel most invested in.
So that is where we started. We collected stories from people in Gateshead about their lives and the things they feel are important. Based on these stories, we made a map of the different challenges and obstacles people are facing, and the things that have helped them. This was based upon causality; how one thing in our life often leads onto other things happening, and how this can create patterns that cycle back and reinforce/deepen the issues previously mentioned. The map has helped us to identify these sticking points that many people share. For example, how people feel lost and in limbo when awaiting help from mental health services, or the lack of support and information asylum seekers/refugees get when they first arrive in Gateshead.
We have now set up some groups to learn more about these sticking points and issues, and the underlying causes. These are called ‘action research’ groups because we are finding out more information, and we also want to take some actions to bring about changes. We have some funding to help us take some actions, when we are ready, and we are asking people that experience these issues themselves to work alongside us, because we know they have new knowledge and ideas that can help us to understand the issues better. Together, we hope to learn more about the issues, decide on some actions that we think would make a difference, and try them out.
Rich Gibbons and Jo Howard
Check out some of the events coming up as part of our Gateshead week.
Starting outside The Staiths Cafe, Wednesday 9th March at 10.30am. Celebrating five out outstanding aspects of Teams and Dunston life.
For more information contact: Christine Frazer: 07596969334
Christine Frazer community developer at Age UK will be taking over the Lankelly Chase Twitter account from Tuesday 8 March -Thursday 10 March.
Follow via @lankellychase
