Author Martin Newman, CEO, Giroscope
Yesterday we took ‘From Homes to Communities’ to Westminster, bringing together people from housing, policy, research and community regeneration at the House of Lords to ask an important question:
What could be possible if we backed communities to shape the future of their own neighbourhoods?
After 40 years of Giroscope working in West Hull, we know that creating a home is only the beginning. Lasting regeneration is about people, skills, confidence, enterprise and the relationships that make a neighbourhood somewhere people can put down roots and thrive.
We were delighted to be joined by Lord Richard Best, who generously sponsored the event and challenged us to keep demonstrating what community-led organisations can achieve.
Keep making the example, the exemplar that other people need to follow. You’ve done it for 40 years. Keep it going.
Reflecting on four decades of practical experience, from bringing empty and difficult properties back into use to creating genuinely affordable homes, jobs and community spaces, we want to set out a clear challenge for what comes next: Give communities the opportunity. Give them the capital and trust them to get on with it.
Yesterday, project manager Caroline Gore-Booth, also brought the conversation back to the important work organisations like Giroscope do to connect people with the right skills and opportunity to move on with their lives.
That connection matters.
There is experience, capability and ambition within community organisations across the country. The opportunity now is to create the long-term, reliable investment that allows that potential to grow, not simply funding buildings, but investing in the organisations and communities capable of transforming them.
Our proposal for the future is simple: put capital in the hands of people already doing the hard work, build long-term partnerships and allow many more communities to do the same.
We are building a strong alliance across the northern half of the country to highlight the varied and astounding work going on in left behind communities. We have called our alliance ‘The Northern Way’ – with projects from Sunderland to Leeds, from Middlesbrough to Grimsby.
A huge thank you to everyone who joined us yesterday, contributed to the conversation and continues to support this work. It was encouraging to see so many people from different parts of the sector in one room, focused not only on what has worked in the past, but on what we can build together next.
Forty years of Giroscope is a milestone. But yesterday was much more about the next forty.
