Hi ,
Recently we've been asking you, in our weekly polls, about your mood towards where we are as a society and your hopes and fears for the future. Your answers have been a genuine high point of the week to read through – we loved sharing the wins you told us about in last week's poll! – but also reveal a lot of anger and anxiety about the UK's direction. It's clear that we need to change direction fast and that we all feel the urgency of the change.
That's why we've spent some time thinking about our strategy for the coming years. As a movement, we've all spent the last decade talking incessantly about inequalities of income, wealth, and power and how that affects every part of our lives. And yes, my housemates are tired of hearing about it, but it's meant that together we've pushed a massive shift in public attitudes towards inequality. The foundations now exist for building a more equal society where everyone can have a good life.
For that to happen, we believe three things need to be realised: a more equal distribution of income, more wealth and resources in the hands of communities, and decision-making power shared fairly. This is the core of our new strategy and it's what our research, campaigning, and collaboration will try to do in the next few years. We're also delighted to welcome a new team of trustees dedicated to helping reach these goals. They bring a huge range of life experiences, expertise, and skills – from midwifery to music; international relations to local development; racial justice to community reporting – that will help us expose and uproot the deep, interwoven inequalities that we face. We really wanted a breadth of experience on our board, so we tried a new recruitment approach that focused on supporting applicants and incorporating all forms of knowledge, and we're so pleased with the new team! You'll hear more from them later in the year when they're planning a digital takeover to talk about their backgrounds, interests, and goals.
Together, this new strategy and team are helping us do really truly unique work to fight inequality. As well as fighting for policies like wealth taxes, proportional representation, and nationalisation, we're tackling the fundamental assumptions that our society must be unequal. Writing about our Community Economist project in a new blog, Caroline Tosal-Suprun describes how questions like "what is the economy?" shifted from an icebreaker to a fundamental question. We're pushing to adopt an expansive socio-economic duty that could change how swathes of decisions are made; working in Derby, Birmingham, and London to build equality at a local level; and working on new research that looks at everything from young people and trade unions to how the media perpetuates inequality.
It's a pivotal time! We need to get things done, and we hope we're a source of hope for you. |
