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A lot of talk about how important it is to have close knit communities and to know your neighbours, mostly from people who have happily avoided both of these things bc they are rich
I really worry about how the word ‘community’ is used everywhere after Covid, and everywhere it’s shorthand for ‘good’ when what it often actually means is ‘no government funding’
The term is amorphous enough to mean anything and nothing at once, which makes it a great political tool. Do we define it geographically? Is it a village? A street? A cluster of identities? Which ones? Who decides?
This is me spouting off the cuff, I’m not a researcher or social scientist, but on the ground I think some themes are emerging.
Firstly, scale. Under lockdown, what we mean by ‘community’ has often shrunk, often to the spaces we can walk to, the people whose faces we recognise and names we know. Networks have sprung up on a tiny scale during the pandemic, mostly through necessity.
The language about what a community is has shifted, and I’m seeing that reflected now in the kind of grant making happening, the way projects are framing themselves. Good decisions about how to allocate resources, it seems, resides at the micro level. Power shed be handed to them
Should!
This, of course, disguises and perpetuates the lack of investment in tackling the systemic causes of inequality. How about the community gets some funding to speedily deliver free meals and household items to the families they see struggling rn.
Well, great as community action sounds, how about in-work poverty isn’t a thing.
How about people aren’t in privately rented accommodation that leaves them w £35/week to live on while sharing a mouldy bedroom with their children, bc we have plenty of high quality social housing. That would really build a community, ya know.
And while I’m here on my soap box, how about we value people *by paying them*. If you look for those doing the leg work for free here, you will, overwhelmingly, find pple who already have a lot of stuff to do caring for others, and surviving a system set up to oppress them.
I see a lot of effort put into mythologising community work, making it something outside of monetary value systems, with big echoes of all our funny ideas about the war and nationhood. Helping each other is about sacrifice and being noble and Britishness innit
Not all heroes wear capes!
That’s bc they can’t afford them.
That’s bc they can’t afford them.
Those volunteering in the community also often do not have enough money to Eat Out To Help Out, which so help me God, I genuinely thought was a sexual health campaign slogan but which turns out to involve Jeremy Hunt so I’m sorry to share that with you but we are where we are
Anyway, looking forward to getting the half price Rona in a gastro pub garden, FOR BRITAIN
