Today we launched Knees Up at BYM, the annual national gathering of Quakers – here’s the little speech I gave there.
QSA is a really exciting organisation to work for because it brings together the sober, time-tested values of the Quaker testimonies with an active and exciting engagement with the sharp end of life in contemporary Britain and the realities of poverty. QSA can boast, as we recently did in the Friend, of being fully Quaker and fully east London. To my mind, Knees Up, our new project, exemplifies this.
Knees Up! is a project with serious community development objectives, framed around the celebratory function of a street party. The street party will function as a Trojan horse. By engaging local people to plan their own street party, the project will bring people together in a positive and collaborative way. Local residents will lead the process, being steered and supported by me only where absolutely necessary. However, during the planning process, I’m becoming a familiar figure and hopefully a trusted one. This will provide an opportunity to capitalise on the feel good factor generated by the party to ask are there other services they would like to access? This would involve signposting but maybe even supporting them to a first visit if they are anxious. Are there gaps in services that they would like to see filled? This will involve helping them think about how to go about this, who to join up with, who to lobby, how to get their voice heard, useful forums they could join. And then working with Living Streets and Suzy Lamplugh Trust to make some positive interventions to break down fear of crime and improve the environment physically.
East London is famous as a welcoming home for generations of immigrants. Yet it is caught in a spirit of indecision between inclusion and tension. By no means am I the first person to suggest that when a bomb went off on the underground on 7th July 2005 at Aldgate East – not half a mile from the area that Knees Up is working – what was being attacked was a remarkable model of integration, as hated by fundamentalist Islam as it is by the BNP councillors a little further east in Barking and Dagenham. In a muted form, these tensions grumble on in the estates of Bow. With some justification, long-term residents feel they have seen the area in which they have lived for years transform beyond recognition and feel like they’ve been left behind. Equally understandable is the suspicion of the Bengali community who feel reviled and distrusted both nationally and locally. Poverty is a real and pressing daily reality in these parallel communities, and it’s all too easy to blame your neighbours for the day in, day out struggle.
Add into this mix the built environment; some social housing beggars belief as tiny windows with frames you could put your finger through look out from concrete monoliths that would not look out of place on a filmset for 1984. Many of the estates in Bow nestle almost literally in shadow of Canary Warf, perhaps London’s most conspicuous symbol of wealth. In recent years there have been fierce battles to hand ownership of decaying social housing to social landlords in the form of housing associations. Some of these have been won and improved, others have been won and seen little change and others have been lost. Those that have not gone over to social landlord’s are left, rightly or wrongly, with a sense of having missed the boat and that the big opportunity for regeneration has been missed.
In this depressing context, what is the point of running a street party? Surely such an intervention is simply rearranging deckchairs on the Titanic. Much beloved of Quakers are the words of Oscar Romero who said, “We cannot do everything and there is a sense of liberation in realizing that. This enables us to do something, and to do it very well. It may be incomplete, but it is a beginning, a step along the way.” This is what Knees Up is, a small scale intervention that will plant seeds we hope will flourish after next April when the project will come to an end. Everything that QSA does is providing small improvements that make life in poverty a little easier and make change possible. A revolution in peoples fortunes lies beyond our possibility but these small changes can make an enormous impact. Knees Up is an excellent example of our constitution’s commitment to “identify gaps in existing provision for social inclusion, building practical projects to meet that gap with clear and concrete benefits, creates services that can be replicated by others and share our learning wherever possible.”
How will it do this? East London is a busy place these days. In the past there were fewer cars and people and less noise. People and community came first. Not many people now know their neighbours – and it is from here that the distrust I’ve been speaking about springs and so in this simple change that the beginning of the solution also lies. If people know each other, they’ll feel safer in their streets. It’s easy for roads to feel, not like places where anyone lives, but just thoroughfares other people use to get from A to B. Streets should and can feel like part of a community home, not simply where a house or flat happens to be. A street party is a great way to get to know your neighbors, take some time to relax and celebrate living in the vibrant, exciting place that, with all its problems, Bow is. And after the party has taken place, who knows what might happen? Everyone will have made new friends, had a great time and seen their streets in ways we’ve not done before. Knees Up will still be around to enable communities to make some permanent changes to their environment. We can help them to take what was best about the streets when we were partying and make it permanent. Together we can make some changes to help reduce fear of crime and keep your street a place where people come first. We’ll work with the Suzy Lamplugh Trust – who’s Director Julie is going to speak to us shortly – and Living Streets who specialize in changing the physical environment to make it a safer, more person friendly place.
Knees Up is a beginning, not an end, but I’m really excited to see where we can go. It’s a deeply respectful form of intervention which is all about listening to where people are at, celebrating what’s best about a community, providing the opportunity to see it differently and then work together to make the best parts of that more permanent. It’s Quaker in that it is collaborative, adventurous, bold, optimistic and cheerful, in the best tradition of George Fox. It’s east London in that it is a vote of confidence in the people of Bow as worth celebrating. And so, in this combination, it is very QSA and I’m grateful to the Quaker community for making it possible with your enthusiasm and money and I look forward to letting you know where it leads us. Thank you.
