Last week at the Glasshouse International Centre for Music in Gateshead Quays, to the stirring accompaniment of Easington Colliery Brass Band, hundreds of people from across the country assembled to talk social capital. This wasn’t an academic seminar series, or a convention of think-tankers and policy-wonks, but a gathering of citizens, community activists, practitioners and public servants who understood that our strength, success, and prosperity as a country lies in the connections between us.
Everyone there had a shared commitment to figuring out how we can work together to build the trust, networks, and relationships – that vital stock of social capital – within and across our communities and neighbourhoods, that is central to building resilience, restoring trust, and unlocking inclusive growth and meeting aspirations. Against the backdrop of the possibilities afforded by devolution, it was a chance to think differently about what success looked look, how we build new kinds of opportunity for the future, and how we can reframe the conversation around what makes communities thrive, and how policy can better support them.
Across the UK, communities are grappling with a complex set of challenges: declining trust in institutions, widening social and economic inequalities, and growing pressures on public health and local economies. These issues are deeply interconnected, and play out at the spatial level of the neighbourhood, particularly affecting those communities that have borne the brunt and been hardest hit first by deindustrialisation, then the financial crash, and subsequently experiencing the successive traumas of austerity, COVID and the ongoing cost of living crisis.
‘Connected Communities – the North East Social Summit’, felt like a turning point for responding to the challenges we face as a society, in a way that puts neighbourhoods at the heart of the work we need to do and communities in the driving seat over the decisions that affect them. Increasingly, thanks to the work of our partners such as the Independent Commission on Neighbourhoods, Local Trust, and Reclaiming Our Regional Economies, policymakers are recognising that solutions cannot be imposed from the top down.
Instead, they must be rooted in the strength of local connections and shared purpose. Policy is finally following the evidence, and the outline prospectus for the Government’s recent Pride in Place strategy, referencing 3ni’s own research into social capital, recognises this. We’ll be working with partners across local government to try to make sure that the strategy is operationalised in a way that learns the lessons from past regeneration programmes and from pioneering examples of best practice, and which genuinely puts communities in control.
We know from the Big Local experience that one way we can improve outcomes, in particular for communities that for too long may have been overlooked or disinvested in, is to nurture the stock of social capital by investing in social infrastructure. And we know that through an Asset Based – and Asset-Backed – Community Development approach we can harness the incredible potential, aspirations, gifts, talents, skills and resources that exist in every community.
Investing in building the bonding, bridging, and linking social capital that underpins community connections, opens up opportunities, and permits co-operation and collective efficacy must be at the core of this work. We also know from the research curated by Insights North East, and through projects supported by the North East Combined Authority that there is of course some great, exceptional work going on across the north east region that we can build on.
From creative projects forging new connections, neighbourhood initiatives building trust and belonging, and foundational economy work ensuring access to essential services, to youth programmes creating pathways to opportunity, we wanted to showcase at the summit some of the incredible work happening in communities across the North East and the country. We also wanted to recognise the growing tensions and divisions we have been seeing across society in general play out in our region, and begin thinking about how we can build on the solid foundations we have to strengthen community resilience, and prevent divisive narratives becoming embedded.
Social capital is the bedrock of our communities. It is time we recognised its importance, and the summit was a first step in building the movement to restore and repair it in communities where it is vulnerable to erosion, and neighbourhoods where it has been in decline. The work of building social capital isn’t theoretical—it’s practical, it’s urgent, and it starts with us, right here, right now, and over the months and years ahead.