On the road to Wigan pier, it's the women driving change
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Version 0 of 1. As a child in postwar Wigan, Barbara Nettleton helped her mother organise fund-raising beetle drives while the men of the community occupied positions and sat on committees at the working men’s clubs and local trade unions. “The community was organised through the working men’s clubs – and women weren’t even allowed in the tap rooms,” she recalls. She still lives in the town, up the hill from the site of the infamous tripe shop where George Orwell stayed when he came to research The Road To Wigan Pier. The buildings he described are long gone – a car park stands where the tripe shop used to be – but the area is still one of the poorest in Wigan. Now 67, Nettleton runs Sunshine House, a community centre behind Scholes Precinct, a concrete shopping parade teetering on the brink of desolation since the post office closed. The area has changed little over the decades, but today those on the frontline between hardship and officialdom are women. “My whole board, all my senior staff, are women – and the people we’re sent by agencies working with the long-term unemployed are men,” she says. “Women hold up far more than half of the sky today,” says Angus McCabe of Birmingham University’s third sector research centre. “The difference is that women come through community. Men used to come through trade union activity while in employment. Now – with the possible exception of tenants’ and residents’ associations – the majority of community organisations and grassroots activism is led by women.” Data on how many women are leading community level organisations is hard to come by, but figures from the National Council for Voluntary Organisations show that, of the 800,000 people it counts in the voluntary sector, almost two-thirds are women. “Women have always been at the heart of working-class communities, but what’s changed recently is their visibility,” says Lisa McKenzie, author of Getting By: Estates, Class and Culture in Austerity Britain. “If you look at protests like the Focus E15 mums who occupied vacant east London flats last year in protest at plans to demolish a housing estate, it’s women who are fighting back.” Nettleton set up a residents’ association in her neighbourhood in 1997, after drugs started flooding the area and one of her neighbours was beaten to death in his house. “We got together to build a bit of community spirit,” she explains. Ten years ago, just as her husband was diagnosed with terminal cancer, the group expanded into Sunshine House. It started with art classes. “When the mines and the steelworks and the mills closed, it took the apprenticeships away,” Nettleton explains. “If you get kids into art and design, it’s a skill they can use.” She also runs a lottery, with an extra number for police officers to increase their chance of winning – meaning patrol cars often stop by for a ticket, raising the police presence in the area. The lottery helps fund a community chest, which gives loans with no interest and no fixed repayments to local people struggling with bills or in short-term need. As the council’s care budget was whittled away, Sunshine House launched groups for people with mental health conditions who, because of benefit changes, are no longer eligible to use day centres. It works with the Veterans Council to distribute grants, helps launch micro-enterprises and organises computer training. A cafe offers hot food at low prices, and the centre is considering digging up its flower beds to plant fruit and vegetables for families struggling with sanctions. It is in discussions with the local healthcare professionals on how to help people with eating disorders. “We’re a bit like doctors anyway,” says Nettleton. “You think of the community as the body, with all the problems and issues of an industrial area. We keep checking the problems and dressing them in different ways.” The story of Sunshine House is powerful and inspiring – but not unique. Across the UK, community centres, crisis drop-in projects and GP surgeries are responding to the years of cuts and austerity with a range of improvised and creative strategies to defend their communities. As with Sunshine House, women are taking the lead. In Leicester, for instance, Inclusion Healthcare is a GP practice and social enterprise running the city’s healthcare scheme for homeless people, which was founded by an all-woman team. Its CEO, Dr Anna Hiley, and executive director, Jane Gray, set the company up when the contract for the homeless healthcare work they were doing was put up for tender in 2011. “I was the GP and Jane was the nurse,” says Hiley. “They were going to put us out to tender on the open market and we were determined that we would not let our service be taken over by a for-profit organisation.” The team will have to compete for the contract again in 2016. “So we need to grow, to become more sustainable, so that next time we [can] compete with the more commercial organisations out there,” she says. They have taken on contracts for substance misuse services – some within the local prison – as well as the young people’s drug team and an asylum seekers’ practice originally run by Virgin Healthcare. The team has grown from a staff of seven to 42, and the turnover has increased from about £800,000 to £2.4m over four years. In Newcastle, Citizens Advice has come a long way from 1939, when the first bureaux opened their doors and “it was only men who were allowed to give advice”, according to Shona Alexander. As CEO of the Newcastle branch, she heads a largely female leadership team, which runs stalls in a local Tesco, pop-up stalls in the community and has started training programmes helping the digitally deprived understand online benefit forms. In south Wales, some 30 years ago there were more Miners’ welfare institutes than days of the year, according to Andrew Morse of the Coal Industry Social Welfare Organisation. Today there are just 38, of which a handful still host brass bands. “Thirty years ago, the boards of trustees of those institutes would be overwhelmingly if not entirely male,” says Morse. “Today, way more than half our trustees are women.” Related: Why I have to stand against Iain Duncan Smith in the general election | Lisa McKenzie The pattern repeats everywhere: former industrial areas where the jobs have long gone are held together and pushed forward by small groups of determined women. Back in Wigan, Nettleton speaks for most of them when she espouses a kind of communitarianism. “The reason none of the changes anyone’s made or are promising will work is that they’re all planned from above, through councils and government departments. Big Society should start on the streets,” she says. Organisations such as Sunshine House should be given money directly to spend in communities, she argues. “They should let us set guidelines for education, because we know the area’s needs and we know what it takes to get jobs. We could help create jobs, educate people, help them learn about their society, help them read and write. “But no one wants that – because they don’t want a population of highly educated people all asking difficult questions.” |