Community Savers and CLASS were back at the amazing Trigonos this year for reflection, relationship-building, and recouperation after another busy 12 months of community action and coproduction.

This year’s strategy workshops focused on developing our financial literacy offer, the potential and pitfalls of going digital, and co-creating a new 3-year strategy for women-led urban transformation that can balance growth with impact and quality of support from CLASS.

Women-led neighbourhood transformation: what works, what next?

• Our approach works because we start with individuals/households and ‘informality’ – people are comfortable in our spaces and the way we do things.
• People love the savings clubs and this is what brings people together – weekly meetings create the space for us to build self-esteem, confidence, connectivity, belonging, financial resilience…. Other issues follow and we can work on them together.
• We are building relationships and understanding within local areas at a time of crisis and division. We look after each other and place value in people, relationships, and compassion.
• We are co-governing well including full transparency over financial resources and decision-making.
• In our relationships with public agencies and authorities we offer solutions, partnerships, and external investment not just challenges/demands.
• We have overcome political resistance with ‘success’ like impactful partnerships and bringing larger numbers of people together.
• Issue-based projects do not survive on their own. Sustaining change around local issues requires the development of strong associations, relationships, and networks. Initiatives fizzle out without a movement approach.
• We need a significant amount of ongoing support for the many existing initiatives spanning so many projects and neighbourhoods but we also need to reach new people and places to achieve wider social justice and to change systems.

Talk About Money

We have achieved great outcomes for neighbourhood change and social and climate justice in recent years such as the Miles Platting Wildlife Corridor and Social Homes for Manchester coalition. Our building blocks remain local women-led savings groups.

We reflected on financial inclusion, resilience, and the idea of ‘financial literacy’ building on brilliant workshops we’ve hosted this year with May Fairweather at Talk About Money CIC. Leaders agreed to further develop their capabilities in this area to build financial literacy among members and encourage increased engagement by parents and young people.

Cashless and paperless?

Its important for Community Savers to be able to organise in ways that work for a wide variety of people and capabilities. We discussed ‘going digital’ and Zoe, Dot and Lina were interested to learn about the new savings app that our Muungano sisters are now using to record and manage transactions in January this year. Being able to come in and save a pound without fear of stigma and doing record keeping that is accessible to those of us who still prefer pen and paper were seen as critically important going forwards. If we go digital and accept direct bank transactions, we need to work this alongside our existing approach to remain inclusive and maintain flexibility. We also need to stay safe and further agreed guidance on this will also be developed.

Equality, diversity, and inclusion

Successive annual workshops on mental health and neurodiversity, and the benefits of diverse leadership, together with the breadth of experiences we have benefited from through Women of Wythenshawe, have encouraged us to think more deeply about leadership, governance, and ways of working.

Approximately 20% of our members are from minority ethnicities and our leadership is 25% minority ethnic, however, only 18% of leaders are Asian or Black. We have a relatively diverse leadership against other characteristics including mental health, long-term conditions, disabilities, single parents/caring responsibilities. The leadership is mostly over 45 and there is a consensus that we have significant work to do to engage younger people and people from diverse ethnic backgrounds.

We discussed a range of strategies for pro-actively encouraging new people to engage in Community Savers including coffee mornings in schools, targeted visits to particular kinds of community group, faith group, and project, and increasing the frequency of our outreach visits to new communities. Leaders also committed to doing more to engage with their existing memberships about the benefits of joining a committee and participating in the wider movement-building activities of Community Savers overall.

Since the retreat, the CLASS team are developing a new initiative to offer experience of charity board governance and the Community Savers movement to women from minority ethnic backgrounds aged 18-35 who are living in low-income neighbourhoods in Greater Manchester and Sheffield.

Movement building, quality, and wellbeing

There is a consensus among the leadership that we want to and should be working to reach more communities - across Greater Manchester and Sheffield in the immediate future - and across the North of England over time.

However, as the number of Community Savers affiliates has grown, as well as their community action having become more ambitious and complex, the pressure on leadership capacity and the CLASS team is being felt. We discussed the need for:

• More support to committees to attract and build their leaderships including with a focus on proactive strategies to attract greater diversity.
• Increased momentum behind the learning exchange visits to new areas that were fundamental to our collective community action before COVID
• A revised structure and expanded team at CLASS. This would include the recruitment of a Movement Coordinator who could manage a team of part-time place-based community facilitators. This could also create routes into employment for local members who have built up appropriate experience (although the roles would not be ring-fenced).

And then… fun!