The Power of connecting people – Our Social Action Hub Network

By listening deeply to people about what concerns they have and what motivates them, we can start to connect them to others in their community who feel the same.

Whilst we do not promote or teach a specific model of organising our Social Action Hubs primarily use a neighbourhood-based approach, which begins with knocking on doors and listening to people where they are at and uniting them around a shared sense of “place”.

The aim is the same in all cases: to connect people, help them to develop their confidence, identify common goals and develop a strategy to achieve them.

Greater Connection Greater Humanity

Sometimes the problems communities face require national action. To take action on national issues requires people to connect across communities on shared issues and this is not always easy, as divisions can exist between communities. In 2022, it was obvious to us that divisions across communities were deeper than ever and for connections to be strengthened we needed to find ways of bringing communities from across the UK together.

We brought people together from the climate movement, those working with communities to end racism and people from our Social Action Hub Network tackling the cost-of-living crisis.

After a year of listening to each other, building trust between the movements, and finding common ground between us, we created Humanity Project. The purpose of the Humanity Project is to create a new kind of people-led politics that gives us control of what matters to us and where we live. And we do this by supporting communities to run local assemblies.

Community assemblies are a great way for people to come together, share their concerns, deliberate on, and make decisions about what matters to them.

And this assembly culture is built upon the powerful act of listening. The Founders Clare, Lee and Nick built trust between their movements by listening. They then asked: What would happen if the whole nation listened to itself, away from the media? If across the country, we came together in our streets and neighbourhoods to hear what others had to say? If the right, we exercised for ourselves, and others was not ‘free speech’ but instead ‘the right to be listened to’? And not just to hear what others say, but to listen to why they think it. That’s assembly culture.

Connecting Assemblies through an online platform

For permanent long-lasting change these assemblies need to feed into a wider, national context, which is why Humanity Project’s vision is for a bottom-up, people-led assemblies to feed into the wider national assembly.

To support this bottom up approach we are working with ISWE who are developing an online platform for community assemblies that will support people all over the world to design and run affordable, high-impact local assemblies on the issues that matter to them.

And most importantly, it will enable people to share the issues they face in their community and actions that have come out of assemblies so that communities can connect with each other more widely on shared issues. This helps to build collective power and create a mandate for change either nationally or internationally.

Connecting internationally – what is a Global Citizen’s Assembly?

ISWE believe that connecting local assemblies through this platform creates a pathway that will help to strengthen global democracy. Another would be through a permanent Global Citizens’ Assembly.

In 2021, Iswe and a global network of organisations and individuals (including Community Organisers) ran the world’s first global citizens’ assembly. It brought together 100 individuals across the world to discuss the climate and ecological emergency, vote on what they wanted to happen, and present these proposals to leaders at COP26.

Iswe has since been building on this work, bringing together diverse organisations and governments to support the establishment of the Coalition for a Global Citizens’ Assembly. We believe that a permanent global citizens’ assembly would radically strengthen global governance: bring about connection and solidarity and accelerate action on the biggest challenges facing humanity.

Next Steps

We have a webinar coming up on 20th May titled “Connecting Communities: Strengthening Global Democracy through Local Assemblies” that will also be an opportunity to demo the platform.

See HERE if you would like to attend this Webinar

The platform will go live soon after this for communities to freely use and offer their feedback on.