For more than four years, the Equality Trust has had the privilege of working alongside people and organisations across Birmingham to explore what inequality looks like in the city. And importantly, what it takes to change it.

Birmingham is one of those cities steeped in history, stories and rich in diversity. Until the mid 1990s it was growing faster than other cities in the UK and was still doing considerably better than Manchester or Glasgow. But it is a city also shaped by structural inequalities.

Our Cost of Inequality project began in 2022 with a simple but ambitious idea: that the people who experience inequality should be at the heart of decisions about how we address it. Alongside our work with Birmingham City Council on the Socio-economic Duty, we built a network of Community Reporters who could gather, share, and amplify the experience of people across the city.

And what a four years it's been.

At the centre of this work have been the brilliant Community Reporters who gave their time, energy, creativity and care to the project. Through this project, more than 25 people have been trained as reporters, each bringing their own experiences and perspectives to the work, but also creating space for others to tell their stories in their own words.

As Hassan Roshan, one of our Community Reporters reflected, the experience taught him “the importance of listening before telling”. That feels like a fitting way to describe what we have learned together. Read his experiences in his own words in this blog.

There is something particularly powerful about the combination of challenge and celebration. While Birmingham has huge inequalities, it also has people engaged and willing to invest in moving towards and enacting change. Our work has repeatedly shown that people in the city, and people in general, are not just passive spectators or recipients of change. And often, need back-up to remove the barriers to their access to power and having their voices heard. We are proud of what we have accomplished together in creating the ripple effect felt from a person to local government. Read Project Lead, Charlie McNeill’s reflections here.

And that brings us to Economic Justice Brum.

Economic Justice Brum is a growing network of people and grassroots organisations working together to image, organise and build an economy that works for everyone in Birmingham. It is one of the clearest examples of people power we have encountered through this project and one we've been proud to be part of as a network member and Advisory Group partner. That of people coming together not simply to describe what's wrong, but developing a shared vision and steps to enact action and change.

So while our project comes to an end, we don’t want to leave with a conclusion. Instead, an invite to continue its legacy and get involved.

The Economic Justice Brum network holds regular meetings where people across the city can connect and share ideas to strategise. The next meeting is on 29 September. Find out more here.

After four years of listening to Birmingham communities, we know one thing for certain: meaningful change doesn't happen to people. It happens with them.

Thank you to every Community Reporter, storyteller, participant, partner, colleague, campaigner and community organisers who have been a part of this journey. We are incredibly proud of what we have built together. Thank you. 

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We asked: what surprises you the most about the correlation between inequality and the climate crisis?

• "Not much of a surprised really. It has been clear for a number of years under successive Governments, that the main political parties are not going to make the political choices needed to address climate change because they have been bought & paid for by the same people that have caused the climate breakdown in the first place. These are the exact same people who are allowed to get away with not paying taxes or contributing to the upkeep of this country. They can afford to pay for private education, private health care, private jet travel, they invest in all the technology that will cause workers to lose their jobs to automation."
  
  
• "I didn't know that climate change & inequality were connected, it sounds to me like if you are poor you suffer the consequences of the disaster! If your well connected & know you can get the help you need quicker than most, that makes you one of the lucky ones?"
  
  
• "That seemingly stable sections of ( poorer) society are simply fractured and driven away because it’s always those with money who profit from these climate-driven disasters.. I hadn’t realised that the money allocated to rebuilding homes was not based on the cost of rebuild."
  
  
• "It doesn’t surprise me but I think it needs to be more widely understood that even in the so-called rich world climate change is driven by wealth. It is not poor people choosing between eating and heating that drive up emissions or ruin biodiversity but the wealthy going on plane trips three times a year and owning large gas guzzling cars. Obvious perhaps but still the rich in Britain like to blame the poor for everything, and there’s always been a disconnect between the way rich Britons view their own poor (‘chavs’) and the way they view foreign poor (‘the noble immigrant savage’)."