How a people-power grid could support civil society and rebuild our communities

The excellent Civil Society Futures report – which I re-read over the holiday break – provides policy, personal and organisational guidance on how to address key issues of Power, Accountability, Connection, and Trust. The inquiry also generated some specific ideas for action across those areas.

One I particularly like is Steve Wyler’s proposal: Our next big infrastructure project: a national people-power grid

The industrial revolution and the welfare state were made possible by physical and social infrastructure:

Canals, railways and tramlines, bridges and roads and motorways, seaports and airports made travel and transport incomparably faster and easier. Hospitals and health centres and libraries and schools and colleges and universities made possible enormous advances in health and learning. Overground pylons and underground cables and pipelines brought power to our businesses and to our public facilities and to our homes. Telegraph wires and telephone exchanges and radio and television transmitters and internet cables and broadband technologies delivered ever faster and fuller communications.

Steve argues that we now need a strategy which will “bring about a society which connects us better, and which humanises the way we do things, and which allows more people to exercise more influence and take more control of the things that matter most to them”. This big infrastructure project, which he calls a national people-power grid would operate universally across the country, but would be owned and controlled within our communities.

Canals, railways and tramlines, bridges and roads and motorways, seaports and airports made travel and transport incomparably faster and easier. Hospitals and health centres and libraries and schools and colleges and universities made possible enormous advances in health and learning. Overground pylons and underground cables and pipelines brought power to our businesses and to our public facilities and to our homes. Telegraph wires and telephone exchanges and radio and television transmitters and internet cables and broadband technologies delivered ever faster and fuller communications.

Steve offers some organising ideas, which I’ve summarised here:

  • People who connect people. Nothing can substitute for the personal touch. In every neighbourhood we need people who are really good at encouraging connectivity to flourish – so support people who help make informal connections in their communities, as well as community organisers who have that role as part of community development programmes.
  • Sustained effort. Community, like trust, is something which can be damaged quickly, but which can take many years to grow strong. We need both the traditional social infrastructure of pubs, coffee shops, libraries and schools, and also community anchor organisations: “a revitalised version of a community centre or hub, lively, entrepreneurial, energising, community-owned and led, driving connection and collaboration, building pride and possibility in the here and now while also playing the long game.”
  • Digital platforms. Our future will be increasingly digital, and a national people-power grid will need to embrace this. We need to use the power of social media to report, share and organise, with a combination of online and face-to-face methods. We also need to organise what we know better. Steve points to Matt Kepple’s idea of a social wiki.
  • Self interest. We will never build a truly connected society if we rely on altruism alone. Steve cites Jess Steele’s proposals for self-renovating neighbourhoods, saying “we need to tap into the great grassroots virtues of thrift, impatience and sociability and work along the grain of real motivation, the desire lines carved out by love, anger, fear and hope.” This involves ideas like time-banks, micro-providers schemes, community shares, and resource banks.
  • Solidarity. Within communities we need to discover and rediscover the art of solidarity, taking steps to understand why some people are left out, becoming curious about what others are thinking, making time to talk about tensions and disagreements, discovering unexpected shared interests. Locally this involves spending more time talking to each other. Nationally we need to build on, and connect, existing networks, like the Plunkett Foundation, Locality, Co-ops UK, the School for Social Entrepreneurs, and Social Enterprise UK.

Steve adds:

In all of this, we are not starting from scratch. There is a great deal to build upon. Let’s celebrate the best work of the councils of voluntary service, volunteer bureaux, rural community councils, community development trusts, and many others. But the real question is whether we can we bring the same level of ambition and creativity to bear, which has characterised the great infrastructure advances of the past?

Furthermore, these steps, ambitious though they are, would be only one phase. If we can create the foundations for a national people-power grid, in a way that allows its development to be open-sourced, and populated by all the individuals and organisations and groupings which want to be part of it, then a great many people will have the opportunity to build further, bringing their own ideas, insights, energy. So that the national people-power grid continues to grow and develop, and becomes so much part of our lives that eventually, as with the rest of the infrastructure which makes our modern lives possible, we almost take it for granted.

These ideas resonate for me on several levels

I hope there might be scope to bring all these ideas together, either through Civil Society Futures or some other convening champion. I’ll report any progress. Meanwhile, I do recommend reading the Civil Society Futures reports, and another of Steve’s blog posts: Civil Society feels increasingly broken – but we can fix it.

Civil Society Futures