During the Fearless Cities South Yorkshire Summit hundreds of people met to consider how we can transform care.
Authors: Ruth Hannan and Simon Duffy
Over the 2-3rd November at the Fearless Cities South Yorkshire Summit, in Sheffield, Citizen Network and Care Full, facilitated a two day event to explore how to create neighbourhoods of care. We heard from an array of brilliant speakers, people working on important elements of the future we want and need, and we also worked together to identify a framework that could helpfully guide our shared work.
At the heart of our thinking were two interconnected proposals, which each of us champion, in our own work and lives. We think if we can keep these proposals in mind and organise around them then we can find a better way to tackle many of our problems - not just the ‘crisis in care’ - but the crisis humanity faces today where economic, democratic, environmental and social systems are being undermined and we are increasingly in danger of generating conflict and catastrophic breakdown.
For some time now Simon has been proposing that the only sustainable future is one where we take seriously our own citizenship, and the starting point for our citizenship must be our neighbourhoods. For this reason Simon has started working with groups across South Yorkshire to develop a Neighbourhood Care Strategy. In Simon’s words:
“The modern world has become incredibly centralised and industrialised. We have forgotten that we are citizens and we have forgotten that most of the good things in life are created through the relationships that we build together. Scale matters; when things are not at a human scale relationships break down. We start expecting other people to solve our problems and we drift into isolation and dependence.
“This has certainly happened in our various care systems. Most of the money in care is spent, taking people out of their communities, putting people into institutions and extracting resources, expertise and leadership out of our neighbourhoods. We know that human beings want to be connected and contributing, yet we’ve sleep-walked into a system that just does not work. It is time to reverse this and to build sustainable and inclusive neighbourhoods of care.”
Ruth started Care Full with Hannah Webster after they both reflected on their lived experience as carers. Reflecting that the current narrative of: “fix social care” wouldn’t address their needs and that we needed a socioeconomic shift that centred care acknowledging it as foundational to society. Ruth says:
“For Hannah and I, a recognition that our capitalist economic model is the root cause of challenges experienced by those with a relationship to care. We need a radical shift away from this model, recognising that care is foundational to all our lives and we will all have a relationship to it. As such, from our social security system, paid work and the model of support must be radically reimagined, led by those with the relationship to care.”
At the end of this article we will share our sense of where we go next for neighbourhoods of care - but first we want to share some of the many different perspectives we heard across the two days. Speakers shared their wisdom after decades of work growing some of the different elements we need to create neighbourhoods of care.
You can see the slides and we’ve provided links so you can connect with the speakers. We’ve also tried to highlight a central issue raised by the presenters and suggested how this connects with the theme of the two days. Of course each presentation contained much more than this, but we hope that putting the pieces together in this way helps show the need to link together these parts.
Since 2010 PFG Doncaster has been building a powerful movement for peer support, centred in the neighbourhood of Intake in Doncaster. Glyn Butcher explained that at the heart of this movement was a recognition that people need above all to be able to connect to others—as an equal. Peer support has generated multiple benefits for people and the wider community and it is now leading to radical reforms in the council and NHS systems. But it starts with an awareness that everyone is gifted—but gifts only come to life through community.
Chris Dabbs, from Salford, shared examples from the work of Unlimited Potential who work to help local people create entrepreneurial and social solutions, built on their own needs and talents. We need to see the strengths in people and communities and overcome the social pressures which tell people they are inadequate or incapable. Working together people can discover their potential and start to transform their lives. Crucially, the approach taken sees that wealth is often extracted from communities, but often with support local communities have the skills and talent benefit not only themselves, but also the economic wellbeing of their community.
Darnall Well Being was inspired by the Peckham Experiment, an early twentieth century pioneering health centre, that put community life at the centre of healthcare. Lucy Melleney and Jack Czauderna explained how Darnall Well Being has been able to challenge our overly professionalised approach to healthcare. Darnall Well Being offers people spaces where they can come together, create new activities and generate health.
KeyRing is a radically different way of thinking about social care and support. At its heart are networks of people with disabilities who are seen as talented people with the potential both to support each other and to make a difference in the community. This model turns upside down the normal model of support which sees people as having needs that must be met. Instead KeyRing sees people as people who have talents that need to be released.
Deana Bamford and Ian Wilson explained how they dreamed up Coalville CAN, a Community Benefit Society that is showing how local people can take back derelict private and public spaces and put them to the use for the benefit of the whole community. These spaces can then create opportunities for people to meet, plan, start a business, share a hobby or solve a problem. The many varied talents of the local community can shine through and help transform the community’s belief in itself.
Liz Leach has been a pioneer of individualised support for people with disabilities and in her talk she showed how deeper listening and the use of techniques like person-centered planning can reveal people’s deeper needs and gifts. She also shared examples of how people used their talents to share joy, music and celebration across the community.
Hélène Reinhard is an architect in Barcelona and part of Barcelona en Comu who has worked with the city as they have pioneered a transformative approach to care. The city has organised itself into super blocks - small urban neighbourhoods - and used these to organise personal assistance, with local people using local staff - this radically reduces the exploitation of care workers (mostly women) and improves the quality of support. In addition a series of measures across the city have been introduced to recognise and validate the role of unpaid carers (mostly women family members). These changes are both economic and spacial—opening up spaces to make it easier for people to be together. This work has been underpinned by political shifts that have also been led by women.
Katie Clarke described how her life was transformed by her daughter Nadia and all the work both Nadia and Katie have done to transform people’s thinking about disability and difference. Inclusion is not about simply welcoming people into the mainstream, it is more about transforming the everyday experience of everyone to include the joy of diversity. This same thinking has led Katie into conversations with people of different faiths and backgrounds. Her work demonstrates that, whatever people’s initial fears, we grow as we embrace difference.
Nathaniel Whitestone is part of a global movement for changing how we make decisions together. The idea of sociocracy is that we can make better decisions if we spend the time trying to listen to different perspectives and seeking to maximise consensus. In addition, in India and South America there are powerful movements for revitalising democracy from the grassroots using neighbourhood parliaments. These movements are radically inclusive: everyone can and should be involved.
Dr Mieke Snijder of the Institute of Development Studies described how it is possible to turn research from a process done to us, to a process we do for ourselves to change our lives and communities. Action research, done at a scale which brings many groups together, to tackle large problems can create dynamic system change. This process also grows a deeper understanding of the forces that currently seem to hold us back from making the changes we need.
Simon Shebersky from SPINDL described how the community of Torbay, over a 10 year period, took the kinds of ideas described above and wove them into a community system of mutual care for the whole community. These changes have had a very positive impact on mental and physical health, social connection, costs for social and health care. This work has been led from within the voluntary sector and has helped transform the relationship between the voluntary and statutory sectors.
After listening to these different presentations we worked together to think about the wider ecology for Neighbourhood Care. We identified many other examples of helpful innovations and together generated this graphic:
There is much to build upon. Or better, there are many seeds to be planted. But we also need to see the bigger picture and start to have the confidence to reshape things so that care grows naturally across all our communities.
We must start our efforts to grow neighbourhoods of care by recognising some important facts:
This graphic offers a generative framework to begin our learning:
This is only a starting point, but perhaps there are two useful analogies or metaphors we can apply as we try to grow neighbourhoods of care:
If you love gardening you may recognise the truth of these statements:
Let’s avoid thinking of ourselves as cogs in a system. It is better to think of ourselves as sharing responsibility for creating beautiful gardens, we are part of nature, but we also exist to serve nature.
The word ‘agora’ is Greek and it is sometimes translated as market. But that’s a very bad translation and it’s a translation that has been further corrupted by our commercial mindset. A better translation would be public space - or even better - citizen space.
The agora is the space where we come together to create a better community.
It’s useful to think about space as an alternative to a system: a space is an environment in which I am free to be a citizen. At the heart of the agora would be completely open space where people could come together at times of crisis - but around the edges of the agora were many different kinds of buildings and other spaces and these organised spaces also indicate some of the varied things we’ll need to do to create neighbourhoods of care.
So we can think of citizen space as being organised like this:
1. Protected open space - The centre of the agora was protected from buildings of any kind. It was for people to meet, connect and do their own thing. This space is critical because citizens are free - and we need space to be unorganised - to do our own thing - alone or together.
We might think of it like the kind of welcoming space created by PFG Doncaster, Coalville CAN or the Public Living Rooms created by the Association of Camerados.
2. Places for learning and growing - At one side of the agora would be shady places (stoas) where people could learn. There would also be libraries and schools. We also need protected places like greenhouses to start growing things, classes, gyms and all the other things we need to get stronger or to try things out.
We might think about how person-centered planning helps people get inspired or how Unlimited Potential helps people to develop new ideas together. Darnall Wellbeing is offering spaces and activities where people can improve their health. Would it not be possible to reimagine how we shared knowledge and skills across our neighbourhoods? What about if we took the money that is spent by the DWP on getting people into work and spent that money on a neighbourhood basis to help people create new local businesses?
3. Places for working, changing and exchanging - Part of the agora was made up of spaces that people could make things, sell things, organise things. This would include, but not be limited to, what we might call the market.
This kind of space would mix together many of the things we think of as statutory, private or voluntary activities. For example, Coalville CAN welcome everyone; but they also create a store where local makers can sell their crafts. KeyRing supports people in ways that focus on helping people get involved in their local neighbourhood. In Whitley Bay people with learning disabilities run the local farmer’s market. We might also wonder about whether many existing things could become more useful to the local neighbourhood.
4. Places for creation, art and play - Another part of the agora was for fun, beauty and creativity. There was a theatre, galleries, sculptures, festivals and race-tracks. This is the space for the things that may not be business like, but they make life worth living for its own sake.
We might wonder where the playing fields and football pitches are. Do we have a local art gallery, festival or music venue? If not, why not create one?
5. Places for meeting, deciding and organising - There were also spaces for government. In ancient Athens this was something for all citizens to use (although unfortunately this excluded women and slaves!). But the city was run by the citizens, they made the decisions and created the laws, they met to think things through, they created roles for people to do essential tasks, used citizen juries to make sure people obeyed the law.
In some places there are Parish or Town councils doing this kind of work (e.g. in Frome). In other places there are community anchor organisations, like Heeley Development Trust that offer some local structures. But often there is very little organised space for neighbourhood governance; this is why Citizen Network created the Neighbourhood Democracy Movement to advance the case for a different kind of democracy.
Let’s build in space for new connections, for new ideas, for freedom, friendship and just having fun. We know neighbourhood care can be life-saving, but it doesn’t need to be po-faced or too serious.
We can also think about neighbourhoods as an economic system. Currently many neighbourhoods face multiple economic disadvantages. Governments often claim to be trying to tackle these economic problems but often the help doesn’t seem to reach people. There are several reasons for this:
The following graphic is based on statistics from multiple sources, but it gives a rough sense of the problem.
So let's reimagine our neighbourhoods as neighbourhoods of care. This is not just about how we organise health and social care services, but it is certainly in harmony with demands to decentralise public services. More fundamentally it is about how we can work together to give each other space and opportunity to care: to care for ourselves, each other and the planet.
This graphic outlines some of the ways resources could be better invested into neighbourhoods:
A couple of weeks before the Fearless Cities event Simon was working with Plena inclusión, the federation for people with learning disabilities in Spain. They have been leading some pioneering work in deinstitutionalisation and Simon was attending their conference to mark the end of the first phase of this work. As part of the event Simon ran a workshop on Neighbourhood Care for people with learning disabilities, their families and professionals.
The basic design of the workshop was very simple. Simon drew a community and then put water all around it. He then asked people to think about what they would do together in a community where the people had to look after each other because there were no outside systems coming to help. In a very short time the room was buzzing with ideas. For example, some people with learning disabilities said that they could “help the old people who were feeling lonely.”
We have got out of the habit of having faith in each other’s good will and capacity for mutual assistance. This is despite what we saw in many communities during the COVID pandemic where communities actually flourished.
For Citizen Network neighbourhoods of care will be at the centre of our work in the years ahead.
Currently all the 6 statutory bodies in South Yorkshire have agreed to work together in a Neighbourhood Care Strategy for South Yorkshire. This means shifting resources and attention away from the centre and helping to build the capacity of every neighbourhood. But it also means listening to and encouraging every neighbourhood to grow and develop in its own way. In fact, across South Yorkshire an enormous amount has already been developed by communities themselves. It’s time to get the services and economic system supporting, rather than undermining, those developments.
If you’re interested in neighbourhood care then please join Citizen Network.
If you’re part of a community group or organisation that would support neighbourhood care then become a group member and put your name on the map.
If you want to lead strategic change to make neighbourhood care a reality at a local, regional or national level then get in touch.
Care is central to all the work Care Full does, we want to explore what a shift to our socioeconomic system would mean for care at a personal, place and policy level. Our existing economic model has determined the way the systems around us are designed, we believe by optimistically exploring what a care-centred society could be we would develop a social security system and models of work (and support within them) that would meet our 21st century care needs.
We believe shaping our neighbourhoods around care is part of this.
We plan to collaborate with Citizen Network to develop not only the practice of neighbourhoods of care but what shifts in the wider economic model are required, how can a care-centred social security system enable neighbourhoods to care as well as rethinking our model of paid work.
Care Full and Citizen Network hope to work together to challenge the current policy environment that, despite the rhetoric, still does not really support care, carers or communities. Join us on this journey.
We’d like to thank all those who joined us in Sheffield, including our brilliant speakers. We’d also like to thank the Fearless Cities team for making this amazing event happen. Special mention also to Ester and Maite Ortega who created the little film at the beginning of this article—which they constructed live during the event. We’d also like to thank our sponsors:
BarryAmiel & Norman Melburn Trust | Care Full | City of Doncaster Council | CTRLShift | Esmée Fairburn Foundation | Fondation Danielle Mitterand | Joseph Rowntree Foundation | LankellyChase Foundation | NHS Sheffield | Research for Action | South Yorkshire Sustainability Centre | Opus | Neighbourhood Democracy Movement | Sheffield Social Enterprise Network | Social Enterprise Growth Accelerator | South Yorkshire Mayoral Combined Authority
Photo of Ruth Hannan
Photo of Ester Ortega and Glyn Butcher
The publisher is Citizen Network. Neighbourhoods of Care © Ruth Hannan and Simon Duffy 2025.
Community Health, health & healthcare, Inclusion, Neighbourhood Care, Neighbourhood Democracy, social care, Sustainability, England, Article
