Housing and community-leadership: sharing learning from reorganising the neighbourhood

The UK housing crisis continues to simmer below the surface of society wide issues such as the COVID-19 pandemic, spiralling energy prices, and stagnating incomes. These crises have exacerbated barriers to housing security, demonstrated by rising rates of housing need and statutory homelessness. Community leaders are at the forefront of developing resilience to an increasing lack of affordability in housing, building community organisations, developing innovative design solutions, and resisting gentrification in their neighbourhoods.

In my PhD research I explored community interventions into the design of housing in neighbourhoods threatened with gentrification, using interviews and focus groups with community leaders and organisations from across the UK. This data allowed me to develop an understanding of how aspects of community leadership in housing can build resilience to socio- spatial issues at the neighbourhood level.

Learning in this area is vital for developing community leaders' capacities and understanding of the opportunities to achieve policy reforms and realise social impact. This is particularly important as government at all levels increasingly responsibilises community infrastructure such as food banks and, as we saw during the pandemic, for systems of mutual aid as part of welfare policy.

But despite a now decade long policy shift to community infrastructure (beginning with flagship policy proposals such as "the big society" and the Localism Act (Bevan, 2014; Brownill and Bradley, 2017)), the material circumstances of working-class communities have continued to decline. The findings of my PhD project, however, attempt to reveal the latent capacities of community organisation to move beyond resilience and build social movements for reform.

Using the national networks developed in my PhD research, the central activity of the fellowship will therefore be to collaborate with community leaders and organisations to design and deliver a Community Leadership Summer School. Using a co-production approach, the summer school will deliver two events with a strong basis in the themes of the Leadership and Organisational Governance Pathway.

The first event will consolidate learning from my PhD research in participating organisations, as well as disseminating learning to community leaders at the beginning of their journeys, through workshops from professional community organisers and community designers. The second event will provide an opportunity for community partners to participate in knowledge exchange in policy, engaging housing policy makers across devolved and local government in sharing understanding about where policy interventions can be made and what the routes to impact for community leaders are in policy spheres.

This fellowship will also be used to develop a funding application targeted for the Friends Provident Foundation, the Nuffield Foundation's Research, Development and Analysis Fund and the Standard Life Foundation, which would enable continuous research in this area that will extend beyond the year of the fellowship. The project will aim to better understand how landlords organise collectively and how they organise their finance, as well as investigating how resistance to landlords is organised - expanding on existing research with community union ACORN to conduct more in-depth, ethnographic research.

This project will also develop my understanding of impact and knowledge exchange, working with REEF's network of contacts and partners - including a leading think-tank (New Economics Foundation), local authorities and devolved governments - to develop policy based on the findings of the research.

Finally, the fellowship will also develop my teaching and paper writing skills in organisational studies, through collaboration with my mentor Dr Owain Smolovic-Jones at OUBS and strategic partner Professor Mihaela Kelemen at NUBS.