How can we support communities to lead the changes needed to mitigate and manage the multiple impacts of climate breakdown?
The climate emergency hits us in the places and neighbourhoods we call home. Each year we are becoming increasingly aware of the tangible impacts of our changing climate and how these are playing out in local communities in so many ways – from water shortages to unbearably hot homes to flooding, rising food costs and food shortages and tensions linked to international migration.
But how can local communities shape what happens in their areas and challenge the way that agencies – across sectors – currently work? How can people find time and motivation to work for change given the daily pressures of rising living costs, long working hours, precarity and fears for the future?
We are working with the Design Council and local partners in Dalmarnock, Plymouth, Sheffield and Walworth through our new Neighbourhood Futures project, supported by the National Lottery Community Fund Climate Action Fund. This will test a new programme to galvanise climate activism and build climate resilience. We are focusing on how change in our built environment - through new homes or regeneration - creates opportunities to influence plans towards a more regenerative future. This could be through physical and social retrofit, improving insulation to cut bill and stop mould, ensuring construction is truly net zero or creating new food and growing systems.
We will do this by working with residents and our local partners – Pembroke House, Nudge Community Builders, Real Ideas, New Practice, Sheffield CLT – to create a new role, the Community Designer. Community Designers will be locally based and will develop ideas, proposals and even prototypes for new ways of working. They will be paid and trained in using design as a tool for social change. We believe everyone can be a designer. Design is more than creating objects and artefacts, design skills can become a powerful tool in shaping processes and systems for social good.
Social Life is supporting the Community Designers and the work in local areas. We are leveraging what we have learnt over the last ten years - through some great work but also through our mistakes – about how to work with residents to maximise their skills and expertise. We will draw on what we have learnt working alongside residents as researchers – from Brent to Clapham Park and the Rame Peninsula in Cornwall; as Community Heath Champions in the south of Lewisham; and in our local area through We Walworth (with Pembroke House, one of the partners for this project). This convened working groups of residents and officers to develop propositions to build social capital through food.
This is the first major new project from Social Life Practice CIC – which we have set up to action the lessons of Social Life’s work over a decade in local neighbourhoods.
Our team
This work is made possible thanks to National Lottery players. The project has received £1.4 million over three years from the Climate Action Fund, a long-term commitment by The National Lottery Community Fund to support communities across the UK to act on climate change and involve more people in positive environmental action.
