Module 4: How to Advocate
Josh Artus
Centric Lab
Featuring:
Anna Francis & Rebecca Davies
Portland Inn Project
In this lesson Josh from the Centric Lab team talks to Anna and Rebecca about the role of Health Reparations. They cover their experience of working on the ground with their community in reimagining and understanding the problem as well as the solution. Their experience of using what they have around them and stretching the learnings from neighbourhood workshops beyond the street and back into their homes is very insightful.
Key Learnings: Definitions
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Creating infrastructures, programmes, systems to autonomously create their own pathways to repair and fortify community health, in our own imaginations to create the information to uplift our community.
Key Learnings: Our Thoughts
The work to fortify community health is precisely in creating infrastructures and various programmes of engagement and activity that use the collective imagination to uplift and support the community.
The work often begins with how can you come together as a community against all odds in a neighbourhood that has experienced long term intentional removal of infrastructure and support. Asking questions such as how can people be resourced when actually many of their lives are challenged by the system
A question was raised on whether or not the Portland Inn Project should house a foodbank, the community decision making panel did not want a foodbank but actually information around food and cooking so that people could increase their agency and empowerment in accessing food rather than picking it up. The Portland Takeaway was initiated by the youth club and involves the young people in the design of the menu, the budgeting as well as the cooking. A process that is much more meaningful whilst still meeting the need.
Portland Inn Project are often in conversation with service providers and funders who do not understand nuance, their role is about bringing this nuance and complexity that reflects truly what is happening on the ground.
Working towards vital physical infrastructure where there is currently none has come from people’s sense of agency and demand.. It feels by design that there is no space to come together in spite of housing regeneration in the neighbourhood.
The opportunity is what can be demonstrated? Neighbourhood workshops where people can take learnings back into their own homes.
Reminding people that the issue may not be the housing, it may be the landlord who is not willing to address the maintenance that needs to be done on the housing.
What in this lesson stood out for you?
Prompts
These questions are framed to help you apply your own experience and perspectives to points raised in this lesson.
What learnings do you have in your homes or communities that can be transferred and embedded into each other?
How can you maximise the possibility for learning and increasing agency for yourself and your community in your campaign?
What are the needs in your community? From this point collectively understand what this need is and what it is stemming from, in deeper understanding the problem, where does your collective imagination go in finding solutions from what you already have?
Engaging intergenerationally in your community will turn up multiple perspectives and wisdoms to the matter at hand, have people lived through what you are facing? Are young people particularly interested in parts of the process that will take you there?
Can you open up what you are working on to be demonstrated back to your community? Even at a small scale, do you have a space where you can share your knowledges, skills and imaginations? Or, is the thing you are working on individually actually a shared issue? Can your journey be shared too?
This the end of the course!
We invite you to continue your journey with the following options: