Stronger Things is strengthening us all - New Local (2024)

Reflections on Stronger Things 2024 by Brendan Martin, Public World.

I had a great day out this week at one of London’s finest buildings, where I was surrounded by about 750 of our country’s most committed public servants, all eager to share and learn from each other. What’s not to like?

Well, actually, the mental buzz with which I left the Guildhall at the close of this year’s Stronger Things was not entirely pleasant – and that, oddly, is testimony to the increasing value of this annual event, now five years old.

Organised by New Local (which seems to be going from strength to strength itself), Stronger Things brought local government councillors and officers together with a variety of people from the voluntary, community and social enterprise (VCSE) sectors.

How can public institutions and the communities they serve optimise their respective contributions in a synergistic effort to improve lives?

Its plenary sessions and workshops explored from diverse points of view essentially the same challenge: how can public institutions and the communities they serve optimise their respective contributions in a synergistic effort to improve lives?

My head buzz by the end of the closing plenary, in which I was privileged to be a panellist, reflected the tension between the need for change and its difficulty, a tension that ran through the whole day.

I couldn’t attend Stronger Things 2023, but from hearsay and social media impressions I gather that its leitmotif was the formation of a ‘rebel alliance’, a term coined at the event in a somewhat uneasy combination of celebration and aspiration.

Not once did I hear that phrase this year. What I did hear was that many people are getting on with making change in manifold ways, learning as they go, continually frustrated by barriers in their way but determined to overcome them.

This year the sense of common purpose was no weaker but the mood more one of dogged determination

If the feeling generated by Stronger Things last year was one of inspirational bonding, this year the sense of common purpose was no weaker but the mood more one of dogged determination: to build that new house brick by bloody brick while also baling out the floods and hosing down the fires in the existing one.

Don’t get me wrong, after 40 years of working as an outsider in and around institutional systems at every level from the local to the global, I can well understand the appeal of a ‘rebel alliance’. Working for radical change is tough and often lonely work.

However, a downside of the rebel tag is the inference that the mission of ‘community power’ is to overthrow institutional power, as though the latter lacks the democratic legitimacy of the former. Yet both are necessary, and each has its own legitimacy, and synergy demands recognition of that premise.

This reality underpinned the whole day at Stronger Things, which opened with Georgia Gould, the impressive leader of the London borough of Camden, showing that the manifold ways in which her council has mobilised and strengthened community assets are guided by an underlying purpose of redistributing power and resources as close as possible to the people affected by them.

For me ‘community power’ is not so much a rebellion as an expression of what should be democratic norms

If that is not the fundamental justification for government and public institutions in a mature democracy, what is? What else could legitimise the exercise of institutional power over our lives?

So for me ‘community power’ is not so much a rebellion as an expression of what should be democratic norms, and the focus on the granular detail of how institutions and communities can collaborate more creatively a sign of the maturation of this growing movement.

That might sound duller but to me it’s more real, a truer expression of the mindset needed to proliferate success and sustain progress, with a determined combination of urgency and patience.

I’ve noticed a tendency among some observers and practitioners of this challenging work to try to abstract features of a successful local experiment, or a few of them, into a set of principles, stick a name on it and declare the birth of a new paradigm.

Some believe that is the route to scale, but I think it contradicts the emergent nature of the diverse changes explored at Stronger Things, where I heard no talk of having cracked the code, much less of claiming its ownership. The atmosphere combined commitment with humility.

In that spirit, we at Public World were proud to be a partner at Stronger Things 2024, and see our Humanity at the Heart offer as a small and specific but significant contribution, alongside many others, to this growing movement for change.

Between us all, each in our own way but collaboratively, we are going to get that new house built. Perhaps then will be the time to name it.

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