09 Aug The latest action from LocalMotion Torbay
What’s been happening recently in the world of LocalMotion?
Nationally, our funders are looking at what’s emerging from the six places in England and Wales and learning how they, as usually separate funding bodies, can work together. One of our Funders, Lankelly Chase, has even decided philanthropic funding perpetuates the problem of power being held by the few that we are trying to disrupt and is redistributing its resources to those doing life-affirming social justice work before it takes itself out of the equation in five years’ time.
In Torbay, we’ve been making sense of the topics, ideas, and themes arising from hosted and facilitated conversations. We’re starting work on what these might mean for nudging the ‘status quo’ and seeing how things could be better for everyone. We’ve been working across three main theme areas; strengthening families, food insecurity and financial wellbeing.
Our Strengthening Families work has formed groups of young people and practitioners around topic areas:
- Raising aspirations for young people using arts as a vehicle
- Feeling supported at school
- 16-25s, thriving in Torbay
- Oceanside youth group, speaking from the edge
- Mental health for young people
- Young People’s Parkfield
- Additional needs
- Environment
The groups seek to understand as much as they can about the issues in their topic and hear from people who experience them. This will help them identify the best area to work on and start trying something new. They might end up working on something different from the subject they started on. This is absolutely fine, as their journey is intended to help them find the root causes of issues. These may be different to the symptomatic issues we see.
Our Food Inequality work is taking two different approaches:
- Community-led work, exploring ideas to answer the question, ‘How can people move from food crisis to sustaining themselves?’ Turning Heads, Ellacombe Community Partnership and Yes Brixham are facilitating, enabling people to lead what happens.
- Taking a ‘food system’ approach that incorporates community connection, education and skills, supporting food enterprise, and collaboration between businesses and anchor institutions. Ideas for this are early in development, and there may be an opportunity to connect with Parkfield in Paignton.
Our financial wellbeing work has had some exciting and energising workshops to identify potential areas for experiment:
- Savings clubs through employers and food clubs
- Get professional, get organised, get competitive! – organising and reducing competition between ourselves in Torbay, which makes us stronger and able to be competitive with areas outside Torbay.
- Self-image development – schemes for adults and children that enhance self-image and enable people to make better financial and life decisions.
- Raising energy – diminishing apathy – encouraging local people to connect with the natural resource on their doorstep and the local organisations and businesses providing services there.
- Children’s business festival
- Nurturing non-traditional employment – supporting young enterprises, entrepreneurship and self-employment
- Releasing real estate wealth for the common good
- Financial awareness for life
- Collaborative skill-sharing platform for the Voluntary, Charity and Social Enterprise (VCSE) sector
The next stage is for these ideas to be worked up in more detail to get to the test stage. LocalMotion can provide collaborative learning opportunities and the time to do this.
Our principles with all this work are for people in their community to be in the lead, supported by LocalMotion’s resources, to develop their skills, take the time to work on it, connect with wider stakeholders, and learn together how we can change the system around us.
All these topics relate to each other in some way, and we anticipate it won’t be long before there will be less separation between the different areas of work. Collaboration and connectedness is the core value of LocalMotion in Torbay.
We’re keen to learn what it takes to make a sustainable difference so we can plan for creating the right conditions to make this happen. Our Long-Term Plan will be submitted next month, and enabling people to get together, collaborate, develop and learn are major features of it. You can see our draft plan on the Torbay Communities website. https://www.torbaycommunities.com/localmotion/
With this in mind, if you would like to be a part of any of this, please contact Jo Curtis [email protected] or 07821 663379.
