In this introductory blog, Ellie Regan reflects on her first two months as Development Worker working alongside Community Savers affiliates (including Brinnington Savers, with Julie and Heather above).

I first came to hear about Community Savers and their work whilst studying for my Masters degree in International Development. Naturally I was intrigued to find out that there was an organisation on my doorstep putting into practice and experimenting with those development models I was spending my time researching. I immediately wanted to know more and identified an opportunity to volunteer supporting Hopton Hopefuls (now Aquarius Community Savers) carry out a block-wide survey for their ‘Ageing Well in Place’ project in Hulme. I was so enthused by the progress that these powerful local leaders had achieved driving change against the odds. Cut to 6 months later and I am very excited to be working at CLASS as the new Development Worker!

I have spent most of my first few months working on the CLASS-Community Savers 2022 Impact Evaluation which has been an excellent way to immerse myself within the network. Conducting surveys with savers, affiliates and partners across the network has revealed the wide reach of the work being done; as well as the diverse pool of amazing but often ‘forgotten’ community members who are both contributing and benefiting from their local groups and networks; and the positive impacts Community Savers leaders are having within their communities and beyond. 

I love the ethos here at Community Savers. The fact that the organisation is women-led really resonates with me. Being able to work in an environment that encourages shared learning is really positive, I’ve got to know many inspiring figures, some involved in community activism for years, others who are only just discovering it now into their 80’s! In October we had a visit from our partners at the Muungano Alliance and got to hear about the way the savings model has been adapted for those living in informal settlements in Nairobi. I have already learnt a lot from the pooled expertise of many of these activists. Being in the presence of so many intelligent, resilient and fun women has been such a joy & really inspired me. 

Looking forward to 2023, I am really excited to see some new savings groups set up as the network expands as well as seeing the direction some of the more established groups begin to take as they build new alliances across the UK & beyond. 

“I am having to reduce the quality of food, so I only buy fruit and vegetables at the weekend. Then I can survive on flour-based cooking.”

From 11-16 July, a coalition of organisations in the Aquarius Estate in Hulme, carried out a survey across six tower blocks in response to the mounting cost of living crisis.  

Community leaders from a dedicated network of groups including Aquarius Community Savers, Aquarius TARA, Epping Street Warriors, and Hulme Tenants Union spent six days knocking on every door across the six blocks and distributing 350 booklets detailing Support & Services available to tenants & residents in Hulme. 

Tenants were supported by CLASS and GMTU. Their aims were:

• to signpost residents to the range of support services available to them in Hulme;
• to link as many people as possible into local solidarity and support initiatives;
• to carry out a survey which would take a temperature test of the impacts of rising costs after stories had emerged of people already struggling to pay for electric and food.

83 surveys were completed in total including 13 with residents of the St Georges and Aquarius estates who attend On Top of the World Project’s Seanchai café at the Aquarius Centre on Wednesdays.

Key Findings

The findings fit into four broad areas: the impact of rising costs, problems with housing, access to the doctors and other medical services, and access to services and information, particularly around money and debt.

Despite surveying the blocks in the middle of July, over a third of participants were already having to cut back on food and energy use, and some were already skipping meals.

38% described their financial situation as ‘finding it quite difficult’ or ‘finding it very difficult’ while 35% said they were ‘just about getting by’.

“I am using the shower at the local leisure centre so I don’t have to use my shower at home. I only shop at ALDI as it is cheapest. I don't have anything switched on except the kettle and the TV. I cook after 11pm as the electric is cheaper at that time.”

In discussions with residents, many said they couldn’t access the services they need.  12% of participants said they cannot access the local services they need this year. 35% of participants said they can only sometimes access the services they need this year. Only 31% of respondents said they can usually access the services they need.

The three most common services that were raised in conversations with tenants were housing, doctors surgeries, and money advice - including debt advice.

"My main difficulty is getting repairs done. Like our toilet. There was a leak from the ceiling from the flat above, and about 2 or 3 months ago they sent a surveyor around.  But still now, no-one has come back to repair it, and we are living here with two young children."

While the most significant drivers of the cost of living crisis are national and global in nature, community leaders in Aquarius believe that through local collective action and appropriate collaboration between local agencies, the worst impacts of the crisis could be avoided. Over the coming weeks, GMTU and CLASS will be supporting tenants to use these findings to approach a range of local agencies and explore ways to ensure Aquarius tower block tenants and residents are supported through the difficult winter ahead.

You can access the full report here.

Quotes shared within this article were recorded as close to verbatim as possible during tenant-led interviews for the cost of living survey exercise.

"I am most proud of being part of Community Savers because I know I am in a movement based on social justice. It’s also the place I’ve been challenged the most but also learned the most." Tina Cribbin, community activist and member of Aquarius Community Savers.

This is the story of how a women-led social movement methodology from the Global South has enabled older tower-block tenants in inner-city Manchester to address health and social inequalities experienced by elderly people living in the heart of the city.

Activists affiliated to Shack/Slum Dwellers International (SDI) have been visiting Manchester to teach at the Global Development Institute on an annual basis since 2011. As a movement that has proliferated across cities of the Global South through community-to-community learning exchange, they soon requested to meet with community organisations and projects during their visits. SDI affiliates always seek out opportunities to learn from other communities about their experiences and strategies for addressing situations of disadvantage.

In March 2016, these exchanges catalysed something exciting and transformative: the first SDI-style savings group was established in Manchester organised by Mums Mart community association in Wythenshawe. Once the torch was lit, the fire spread quickly. Partnership between the Global Development Institute, University of Manchester and the Realising Just Cities programme and University of Sheffield enabled a series of international visits from community leaders in Greater Manchester to first the South African, and then the Kenyan SDI affiliate, to take place.

Six years later, and despite the hurdles presented by the COVID-19 pandemic, there is now a network of five neighbourhood-based savings initiatives spanning Manchester, Stockport and Sheffield. Community Savers is supported by Community Led Action and Savings Support, which helps to facilitate the savers network, establish new groups, and continues to support leaders to exchange with their Kenyan mentor federation Muungano Wa Wanavijiji.

Community Savers groups have made amazing progress supporting their communities through the pandemic, developing poverty reduction projects and innovations, and increasingly developing new visions and partnerships for their neighbourhoods which can address the long-term disadvantage experienced in some of the lowest-income neighbourhoods in Greater Manchester and Sheffield.

One of the most exciting new partnerships to emerge from their efforts is the Ageing Well in Place in Hulme initiative which brings together tenants, their housing provider, the Manchester Local Care Organisation, local voluntary and community sector organisations and two universities to co-produce solutions for elderly and vulnerable tower block tenants living in the Aquarius estate, in inner-city Manchester. The impact has been so profound that one of the leading tenants’ group, Aquarius Community Savers, have recently been nominated for a University of Manchester Making a Difference Award.

Here, Tina Cribbin, long-term Hulme activist and member of Aquarius Community Savers shares her experiences of adapting the idea of enumeration and profiling from the SDI toolkit for her group’s own local purposes.

When I first came into contact with Community Savers, I had been active in the community for thirty years from being employed as a youth worker, social worker, women’s support officer and many more that were unpaid.

Over time, I learned that if I tell my truth and my community’s truth through art, people are more likely to accept what I am saying. I published a poetry collection called Classphemy, wrote a play Can you hear me from up here? through On Top of the World project, and set up two writing groups including Hulme Writers, which I run through On Top of the World.

These creative activities have been focused on speaking truth to power about the negative impact of university and inner-city expansion and gentrification on my community.

You can imagine what my thoughts were when I was approached by Sophie King (Director of CLASS), who was at the time a university academic, to participate in a gathering called “inner-city exchange”. Universities held lots of negative connotations in Hulme as they have basically taken up the land where we used to have social housing and community facilities. I had zero interest in working with another academic. So much so, that I even wrote her a poem about why.

Sophie recognised my sceptism about academics and asked Sharon Davis from Mums Mart to come and talk to me about Community Savers. I now know that this is how Community Savers operates – community to community, woman to woman. Sharon spoke my language and I felt safe that I wasn’t dishonouring my community by participating.

I was able to totally grasp what the community savings were about and the history of how it grew out of exchanges with Shack/Slum Dwellers International federations as Sharon had already been to learn from community activists in South Africa and Kenya.  It made sense - it was much more than a savings group it’s a social movement that is run by women not so different from me. I, like every woman on the planet, know that the personal is the political. Every penny saved is an act of resistance and challenge to those who control our lives worldwide.

It was impossible not to want to be a part of something so amazing!

I was so impressed when I met Anastacia Wairimu (see header photo) who is a lifelong leader of the movement in Kenya and who came to visit us in Hulme in 2019. It made me realise just how big the movement is. And how organised they were in their communities. Anastacia showed me clear examples of how the movement worked with women to finally getting their own homes constructed, getting roads built, getting electricity and water. It inspired us when she talked about collecting information as evidence to bring to the authorities. Although we lived worlds apart, we were together in being resistant to inequality and understanding that working together as women, we can bring change.

Inspired

Inspired from Anastascia’s visit, and together with On Top of the World Project where we run a weekly drop in with older tenants, we began to think about the issues facing our community and particularly tenants at Hopton Court where I live, and where 75% of tenants are aged 50 and over. We knew that many of these tenants were in vulnerable or difficult circumstances and often had poor health but were not receiving the care they needed. We were aware that some people were hiding their frailty for fear of being moved away from the place they call home. There was a lot of isolation and nowhere for us to come together during the pandemic.

CLASS supported us to develop a partnership with two academics at the University of Manchester (MICRA) and MMU (MSA), and our housing provider One Manchester. We did some interviews with tenants and other people like local GPs which enabled us to get an overview of some of the challenges tenants were facing. However, this only captured the experiences of a handful of tenants.

With support from a PhD researcher at the University of Manchester, Whitney Banyai-Becker, we were able to get some social responsibility funding to take forward a tenant-led survey of our whole block.

This was different to other research projects I’ve been involved in because the actual questions were designed by the tenants themselves. We felt ownership of the project. We worked with Whitney and Sophie to co-design the whole thing. We were able to share our expertise about how to approach our neighbours and what would be needed to encourage their participation, also about safety and protecting people’s privacy and confidentiality – we know our own community well and we knew what people’s concerns would be ahead of time. Whitney and Sophie could share more of the academic side and make things systematic, ensuring information was recorded systematically and that surveys were written up and analysed, which meant they could do the report writing at the other end of the process.

We began by talking with residents about what changes they would like to see at the block, but the questionnaire covered wider areas such as access to services, social isolation, health and wellbeing and feelings of connectedness. We were a bit pessimistic when starting because many people didn’t answer their doors. But we kept going at different times and once people got the idea that it was their neighbours trying to make improvements, they were willing to engage with us. We got over 50% response rate which far exceeded our expectations.

Although Sophie and Whitney were there for support, it was tenant-led which gave us the drive and motivation to do right by our neighbours. Furthermore, it gave me and other residents something we had not had before - hope. I felt Anastacia and all the African sisters with me. Whilst I was walking at night in the rain, I realised they were probably doing the same. It gave me strength (read the poem I wrote about this here).

Positive changes

Since doing the survey, life has completely changed at Hopton Court.

We’ve formed a steering group to establish something called a ‘Naturally Occurring Retirement Community’ or ‘NORC’ at our block and for the benefit of tenants in neighbouring blocks. We’re working closely with One Manchester who have employed a full-time Independent Living Advisor with support from Manchester Local Care Organisation. Now there’s someone ensuring that older tenants are getting access to the support and services that they need to ‘age well in place’.

A new community hut is going to be constructed in our shared garden area, so that we’ll always have somewhere to socialise together and access information and support - even in the winter months when it is too cold to sit outside together. This is a participatory design project through which One Manchester will work with tenants to create a new age-friendly facility for our estate. A lot of assets like this have been lost to regeneration and university expansion, so it will be good to bring something new which will be really valued by older people locally.

One Manchester are also about to employ a ‘NORC’ Development Worker to really get our retirement community idea underway. They’ll be working in partnership with our growing group of older tenants called Aquarius Community Savers and with On Top of the World and other age-friendly groups and projects in Hulme to address the challenges older people face in our community.

We’ve been working on this initiative for over two years now. Learning, planning, designing, learning to trust the process and learning to trust ourselves, realising that we’re able and should be part of those meetings.

The path to change does not run smooth

Sophie asked me what has changed and what am I proud of...

I think what has changed is that it’s been at times an uncomfortable cultural shift for people at One Manchester, learning to trust us and work with us tenants as equal partners.

And certainly, from the residents’ side, we have learned to trust, respect and work with them in a way that just wasn’t there before. Trust is fragile and will always need work to maintain it.

What I think every person needs to learn is how power structures work. Now when I’m working in the community, if something is not as it should be, I won’t hesitate to take it higher – you have to work around those who may not understand what you are trying to achieve or have the power to work with you to achieve it. You can’t work upwards through straight lines and sometimes you need to go backwards or press pause before you can go forwards again. I can definitely tell you it works.

I am proud of my community for being part of these changes.

I am most proud of being part of Community Savers because I know I am in a movement based on social justice. It’s also the place I’ve been challenged the most, but also learned the most. I’ve learned to work smarter, not harder. In November, I will be visiting Anastascia and other Muungano Wa Wanavijiji members in Nairobi together with some of the other Community Savers leaders. I am so excited to finally get to Africa and meet my African sisters and learn from them, whilst being able to share our learning from Hulme. I want to see how they carry out collections, what women are saving for, and the amazing changes that they are bringing for their own communities there.