Hi ,
We're up against a system that has inequality built into every facet. It's vast, dehumanising, and vulnerable to the manipulation of the rich and powerful whenever their interests collide with ours. Things have been going pretty badly the last few decades, but the foundations stretch back hundreds of years. It's going to be difficult to dislodge.
One of the reasons we're embracing community reporting in response is because it lets us record how it feels to live in a system like that. The reporting captures, without mediation from our broken system, the impact of inequality and ways society could run differently. It's a hopeful way to respond to the crisis, inspired by Pierre Lévy’s concept of collective intelligence: “Nobody knows everything, everyone knows something, and all knowledge resides in humanity.”
So alongside new programmes for community economists and a new community reporter group in Birmingham, we're excited to update you on our new community reporting cohort in Brent, London! We've recruited members of the community interested in, and connected to, inequality issues from access to housing and green space to migrants rights, disability justice, and the arts. Our first phase of training workshops kicked off last weekend, where the new reporters began discussing Brent's inequality and deciding the questions that will form the basis of their interviews with community members. They'll spend the next two months collecting and curating stories about life and inequality in Brent, forming a new body of evidence about inequality's impact. |