How can institutions work with communities to create better work and foster healthier relationships? The Barbican’s Anna Casey, Divya Satwani and Lara Deffense from the Communities & Neighbourhoods team share what they’ve learned from recent initiatives.
“I believe that power permeates every conversation and relationship we have. To know ourselves and genuinely relate to others we have to understand our relationship to power in any given moment.”
– Suzanne Alleyne, Neurology of Power
How can we hold healthy and equitable relationships with communities? How can we acknowledge and take responsibility for the power we have while also shifting the patterns of how power traditionally flows? How can we create supported environments in which people can make things that matter to them happen?
In this chapter, we’ll talk about some of our projects and how we’ve tried to work in new ways to shift the way power flows through them with a focus on three key areas: resources, relationships and space.
Who we are
Barbican’s Communities & Neighbourhoods team has only formally existed for a couple of years. It grew out of a collection of projects happening outside of the Barbican building, in our local neighbourhood and across east London. Previously, as producers working in separate departments leading these projects, we were trying to work in more community-led ways, nurturing networks of relationships and creating the conditions to bring people’s ideas to life. Over the last few years, accelerated by the pandemic, the team was formalised and now collaborates across a larger portfolio of work, and the Communities & Neighbourhoods Team was born. This new way of working has helped us articulate a more intentional values-led approach and practice together, and to embed these ways of working across all our programmes.
One of the key areas of enquiry that’s emerged from collaborating with so many amazing local organisations over a period of many years has been around increasing awareness of power dynamics at play and our relationship to power – how it impacts our projects and how we can use new models to recognise and shift it.
We are still very much on a learning journey, constantly inspired by the incredible work happening across the sector and in communities. We’ve included links and references below to some of the great work we’ve been inspired by.
In practice: How can we distribute resources in more equitable ways that shift power away from big institutions?
The Imagine Fund
During the 2020 lockdown, as our big festivals and mass participation projects were cancelled, we began asking ourselves important (and scary!) questions about how an institution could be better neighbours with its local community.
One of the first challenges was establishing better channels of communication – at the time, we didn’t have particularly strategic ways of listening to local people about what mattered to them, what they were excited about, and what they’d like to see change.
We also began exploring how we might make our resources available to more people. The Barbican is responsible for all sorts of assets and resources, from funding and equipment to spaces and infrastructure; we wanted to share them with our neighbours. But what’s a genuine, democratic way to do this, and how can it be managed? What resources might also exist within the community and our networks that could be shared?
With both these challenges in mind, we decided to try repurposing our programming budgets into a community fund, managed by the local people and inspired by participatory grant-making.
Participatory grant-making is a process that gives decision-making power about funding – including the strategy and criteria behind those decisions – to the communities that funders aim to serve.
We hoped that by inviting local people to share their ideas, and by making micro-grants available to test new ideas in the area, we might learn more about what people want and need, and support some incredible new community-led projects to get off the ground.
Pilot phase
The first step was setting up the Imagine Panel: a group of 12 people from a range of backgrounds with strong links to the area. Panellists were nominated by local connectors and included a broad range of people, from residents of estates and small businesses to charities and young people.
The group met in two stages, setting key objectives, creating a framework for scoring applications, and shaping the decision-making process for how the fund would be distributed.
Applications were opened, and from 50 applications, the panel selected ten new projects. We made new connections with local people as strategic decision-makers and creative leads, and learned a lot about how this kind of process can be delivered.
What we learned:
Building trust
People come with pre-existing ideas and experiences of your institution, as well as a range of lived experiences themselves, so it helps to provide context setting for the work. We asked: why is this way of working important to you and the project? Where does it sit in the wider context of the institution and systemic forces at play? How can we be aware of privilege in the space and make it as open and supported a discussion space as possible?
Be transparent. Share as much information as possible about budgets, processes and outcomes, so people feel informed.
Community Experience
Allow people to get to know each other before the ‘work’ begins, to build community and positivity.
We made participation a paid opportunity, but money wasn’t the only barrier to think about. Because everyone is different, there’s no ‘one size fits all’ approach. How people contribute needs to be co-designed with them to make sure it works. Make sure people can choose how and when they want to communicate and via what platforms. Don’t assume anything. Equally, paying people isn’t always the best option – there’s an interesting article here about the challenges it can cause to people in receipt of benefits, for example.
Make it fun! We’re not just sharing money, but also energy, ideas, community and more, so approach from a place of abundance, not scarcity. Value is not just in the grant-giving itself, but in the knowledge and lived experience found within the community, the relationships formed, connections and collaborations sparked.
Tools to support this work
We’ve experimented with some new great new tools and platforms to help increase transparency and collaboration. Here are two we found particularly helpful:
GoodGrants is a content management system (CMS) for designing, managing and scoring grant applications. The company says: ‘Our mission is to democratise grants management, to help good organisations do good.’ Using this CMS allowed us to build our application forms easily, collect data safely and cut down on a lot of the admin of managing and collating Panel members’ scoring.
Open Collective is a fiscal hosting service used by the Social Change Nest CIC to help people and communities to receive and manage funding in a safe and transparent way. They say: ‘The Social Change Nest specialises in creating and supporting people-powered networks and social movements. After years of supporting and incubating grassroots groups, we know how important it is to have a collaborative and transparent way to manage funds.’
Using this service means our grantees can access their money and pay people easily in a way that works for them, and we have a clear and transparent understanding of where our funding is being used.
Inspirations for our team and other examples of great work
Participatory grant-making shifts power by recognising communities as experts and decentralising power from institutions. You can find out more about this kind of work at Participatory Grantmakers Community, a global network of organisations connecting and sharing best practice.
Sharing other resources
We’ve been inspired by resource-sharing models like Library of Things , Everyone Everyday, and Not Nowhere, as well as the brilliant London’s Giving Network.
In practice: How can we nurture networks in equitable and inclusive ways that shift relational power?
Leytonstone Loves Film
Leytonstone Loves Film (LLF) is a network of film lovers who are interested in how making, sharing and exploring films together can strengthen relationships with each other and with the places we call home. It began in 2019 as a community-powered festival, bringing together a programme of film screenings, talks and workshops hosted in a broad range of indoor and outdoor venues on Leytonstone High Street in east London. Over the past couple of years, the festival has created space for a growing network of film creatives, producers, makers, exhibitors and fans to connect, share, learn and collaborate.
Weaving from the inside out
When thinking about the network, we were inspired by Fabian Pfortmüller’s model of community weaving, working from the inside out. He says ‘healthy communities need a centre of gravity with dense and trusted relationships. Otherwise, they are hollow and unsustainable’. It was important to ensure that we started small and focused on developing core relationships that were reciprocal and built on genuine trust, but also that the network grew from a diverse set of partners that were representative of the Leytonstone community.
Distributed by design
To grow the network of contributors ahead of the 2021 festival, we tested a nominations model which decentred the Barbican and explored how to foster a more distributed tangle of interconnected relationships. Each organisation or individual within the network has connections with people and practitioners we could only dream of reaching. To honour and value these networks, we asked existing partners to invite people they felt should be part of LLF to contribute to the network and the 2021 festival. Each nominating partner received £500 as a mentor fee and a further £500 micro grant to pay their nominee, who was new to the network.
Through this model, funding was distributed via existing partners to new collaborators working at a grassroots level in the community. Nominating partners were also given funding to recognise the value of their vital insights, leadership, local knowledge and mentorship. A total of £15,600 was shared using this decentralised model, providing funding to new partners, diversifying our networks, and increasing representation across the festival. It is also important to note that the heavy administrative burden of this kind of small grant funding was greatly reduced. Requirements for the agreements between old and new partners were as simple as possible, with the guiding principle behind distribution of the funds being trust and simplicity.
Open calls often rely on long and complicated application processes, and tend to be more accessible to people with more experience, time, resources and support. The nominations model helped open the network to new partners doing grassroots work that isn’t always visible and to people who don’t have the capacity or incentives to apply to open calls. For some of these partners, it was also a real boost in confidence, and access to an opportunity they wouldn’t have felt able to apply for without the support of their nominator.
Tools to support this work
Regular gatherings are invaluable. We held regular network meetings as a way for people to connect, get to know each other, ask questions and raise any issues. They took place mostly online to ensure that as many people as possible could attend. When meetings were held in person, we used spaces like the local library that had minimal barriers to access. There were also informal gatherings, such as meals together, where relationships could be deepened and strengthened.
Community platforms like Mighty Networks allow you to invite collaborators into a collective online space where they can share information, meet, organise, and connect. Obviously, these spaces have to work for the people they’re intended to serve, but if the community has a level of ownership over what goes on to them and how they’re used, they can be extremely helpful places of peer-to-peer connection.
Inspirations for our team and other examples of great work
We were really inspired by initiatives such as the Relationship Project, who aim to make it easier for every organisation, service and place to put relationships at the heart of what they do.
We’re also interested in how relationship infrastructure can be made more visible through projects like Understory and how we can activate the power of peer-to-peer connection and learn from organisations like Huddlecraft.
In practice: How can we shift power by holding more equitable spaces of care?
All collaborative work needs space where people can meet, listen and share ideas.
We’ve been thinking carefully about how power operates in these settings, how we can be inclusive and how we make sure everyone’s contribution is valued.
Community Impact Collective
We set up a new peer-learning network, the Community Impact Collective, in spring 2022 because we had come across such a wealth of collective expertise from people working hyper-locally in the City of London. We knew there were various organisations and freelancers working closely with local communities who potentially shared similar values to our own, and we wanted to explore the possibility of working together. Our vision for the collective was to create ‘a thriving ecosystem of considerate connectors’.
The collective became a space where people working with communities in the City of London could connect, to share and strengthen our practice.
The 2022 Cohort
We put out an open call and recruited eight members to the collective (ten, including staff from the Barbican Centre) – a mixture of people who represented institutions, worked as freelancers or on behalf of grassroots organisations.
The programme has so far consisted of seven workshops, and is being co-designed by the participants. Each session was delivered as a collaboration between an external speaker and two group members, and topics included issues such as Power and Anti-Racism, and Sustainability. Other members of the group acted as scribes, hosts and guardians to ensure the sessions were held in an equitable way where everyone’s voice was heard, responsibility was shared, and ideas were documented.
A values-driven process
At the start of the programme, we spent an initial three-hour session with external facilitators encouraging us to share the lived experiences that had brought us to the space and set values for how we wanted to work together. This set the tone for how the group wanted to operate, and reminded each other that we are all human, with various needs. Rather than focussing on outcomes, the focus was on how we shape space collectively for fruitful conversation to emerge.
Moving at the speed of trust
Trust-building has been an integral part of forming open and productive relationships with the members of the collective. The group shared personal stories, and people were vulnerable and demonstrated a willingness to be present, even during uncomfortable conversations, showing their commitment to the values of emotional safety and care set out at the beginning of the process.
‘I was one of three people who delivered a talk on access and inclusion at the Community Impact Collective. The process made me think about what access and inclusion meant to me professionally and personally. I delivered a story of generational differences through the ages and how it affects Protected Characteristics. I was authentic and honest with my presentation and felt safe in the space, and was supported by my peers and Divya. It was valuable to see that others could feel comfortable sharing their stories…Seeing how far we have come from three generations ago is excellent, but we have much more work to do!’
– Harshita Patel, SEND consultant, CIC participant and co-facilitator on the Access and Inclusion workshop
Conflict is welcome and part of the work
As a collective, part of holding each other to account was accepting that conflict may arise, it would be uncomfortable, but it was important to face it head-on. We understood that everyone in the collective came from a diverse range of lived experiences, so we welcomed conflict arising rather than avoiding it. We also carefully considered who should be steering the conversations when certain conflicts arose, and made sure that we brought in external expertise with specific skills, knowledge and lived experience when that wasn’t represented in the team. For instance, we knew our workshop around anti-racism would be particularly sensitive, and wanted to ensure that the proper care was taken to emotionally safeguard members of the collective. We brought in a specialist facilitator, Vanessa Faloye from Held Collective, to support the delivery of the workshop. Having conversations grounded in her expertise, care and knowledge meant that we were able to have a fruitful conversation in a safe and considered environment.
‘Within our group, we had differing opinions and understanding around some key concepts and use of particular language, which had created some disconnection. Divya and Vanessa worked diligently to understand the issues from all sides and worked with us to co-design a session that would allow us to safely explore these issues. The key take-away for me was the need to create safe spaces where we could hold differing opinions but still be able to discuss them, rather than shutting the conversation down. This safe space and having our concerns heard during the design phase was crucial for us to find common ground, which we did in the end. It was a game changer for me.’
– Shannon Ghannam, The Magnum Photos Foundation: CIC participant and co-facilitator on the Power and Anti-Racism workshop
The programme delivery is linear, but the learning journey isn’t
Although the programme was delivered in a linear series of workshops, the learning came from members of the collective being able to pull apart the programme, feed into its design and consult with external guest speakers about the delivery. What we’ve discovered is emergent and can be messy, but by embracing that, the group has challenged its thinking and can see a more positive, equitable future for the communities they work with.
‘I really appreciated the wide variety of practices and ways of thinking about inclusion. I also thought the diversity of presentations was really important – some of it was really organisation-focused, some of it was more personal, some of it was art/community practice-focused.’
– Kelsie Acton, Inclusive Practice Manager and guest speaker at the Access and Inclusion session
Adapting to the emergent process
Inspiration for this way of working has also come from writer and facilitator adrienne maree brown, and her book Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds. She provides this useful facilitation advice:
‘Trust the people.
Set goals and intentions.
Invite the people.
Develop a spacious, adaptable and living agenda so participants can shape the meetings.
Point continuously to collaboration
and listen with love!’
Having openness to convene space which can shift like water, as part of a living agenda, we’ve been able to respond to the emerging needs of the collective and generate space for new conversations to arise.
For example, a recurring theme from conversations in the sessions was how we decolonise, unpack, and reframe language. Because this issue arose so frequently, we decided to add an additional workshop to the programme to collectively think about the terminology we use. We worked with an external facilitator to explore terminology that arose during the programme, such as ‘social mobility’, ‘inclusion’ and ‘decolonisation’. We explored how particular words were used, and where they could have originated from, who it uplifts and who it might alienate. We debated its usefulness and embraced the wide range of perspectives in the space. The workshop opened more questions, and we reflected on the fact that there is much more to unpack around this topic because language is ever-evolving.
We initially thought the outcome of this workshop might be to design a community glossary detailing some of the definitions of the words we use and how to use them, but shifted this to create a facilitation tool that people can use to interrogate and explore language within communities on their own terms.
Tools to support this work
Much of this co-design work and the structure of the meetings held was based on The Circle Way, a model we use in our Communities & Neighbourhoods team meetings to share space and responsibility equitably.
The Circle Way aims to ‘put equity and justice in the centre…[and] unequivocally affirms the essential practice of turning to one another to uphold racial, ethnic, gender, disability, economic, and environmental justice’.
Inspirations for our team and other examples of great work
As well as adrianne marie brown’s book mentioned earlier, we were deeply inspired by current and former employees who shared their experiences of racism at the Barbican through barbicanstories.com and by the incredible Suzanne Alleyne, whose event series Can We Talk About Power? kick-started a series of transformative conversations across our team.
Questions sheets in this chapter were illustrated by Rae Goddard, with content contributed by the Barbican’s Communities & Neighbourhoods Team and Community Impact Collective.
