Community power – or just responsibility?

What will the lasting impact of the COVID-19 pandemic be on your community? How are needs experienced at community level identified and understood? To accompany the latest briefing from the Third Sector Research Centre’s research into communities responding to COVID-19, Dr Rob Macmillan of Sheffield Hallam University explores the impacts and challenges communities have faced and what lies ahead.

Eighteen months on from the first lockdown in spring 2020, the deep-seated impacts of COVID-19 – on health and well-being, the economy and everyday life – continue to be experienced across communities.

The pandemic has also been accompanied by a searching analysis of its many-sided challenges, uneven consequences and intensifying social needs. Looking ahead, it is thought that a ‘long shadow’ of impact will be cast over the coming ‘COVID decade’.

Alongside weariness, exhaustion and sometimes burnout, many community groups and residents active in their communities have felt a genuine, energising ‘buzz’

In the latest briefing from our long-term study into community responses to COVID-19, we take a close look at how different communities are identifying and understanding changing needs and explore the dilemmas and challenges they have been encountering on the way.

Going beyond the call of duty

Community responses to the pandemic have been widely recognised, celebrated and supported. Many individuals and groups have been on the frontline and gone way beyond any call of duty, to provide lifeline support to the most vulnerable and to address emerging needs.

Alongside weariness, exhaustion and sometimes burnout, many community groups and residents active in their communities have felt a genuine, energising ‘buzz’ about the contribution they have been able to make – simply being able to do something immediate, purposeful and practical in their communities.

In our research across 26 different communities, we saw three overlapping phases in responses to changing needs:

• an immediate practical response to needs arising from successive lockdowns, for food, medicines and creative activities, then
• a question of whether to revert to plans and activities addressing pre-pandemic needs, and finally
• looking seriously at longer-term needs, including job losses, debt, digital exclusion and mental ill health.

Communities in the study appear to be more alive to the depth and extent of need in their neighbourhoods

Community groups have been asking whether COVID-19 has created new needs or made visible the sheer scale of pre-existing (and often hidden) struggles experienced by some groups, around poverty, food insecurity and social isolation.

COVID-19 has been referred to as a ‘syndemic’: a perfect storm of infectious disease and inequalities. Certainly, communities in the study appear to be more alive to the depth and extent of need in their neighbourhoods, but three main approaches can be seen:

1. a desire to forget the last 18 months and return largely to the kinds of activities they were involved in before COVID-19
2. apprehension and uncertainty about how to respond to the sheer scale and intractability of emerging needs
3. a discussion of new priorities, planning what to do, raising funds and joining up with other agencies.

The question of responsibility

Communities encounter a number of dilemmas and challenges in responding to local needs, but arguably the one with the most far-reaching significance is who should be responsible for meeting those needs.

Community groups have experienced greater pressure to do more in their local areas and have even added to the pressure themselves.

The arguments for community-led action are compelling, although the communities in our research express some anxiety that they are filling the gap left by resource-constrained local authorities and overstretched local public and voluntary sector services.

Our mission should be to empower people through reform of the way communities are governed and local decisions are made.”

The celebration of ‘community spirit’ underpinning the response to the pandemic raises high expectations about what role communities can and should play beyond COVID-19. It partly fuels gathering interest across the political spectrum in the idea of community power, of moving beyond out-dated state- or market-led approaches to public services, towards a new community paradigm.

To date, though, the debate appears to have focused on devolution of power, on governance and decision-making, of getting beyond Whitehall and Westminster.

For example, a recent report from Conservative MPs spoke of trusting the people, arguing that:

“our mission should be to empower people through reform of the way communities are governed and local decisions are made. The next stage of the Conservative story is community power”.

Power or responsibility?

Curiously, far less is being said about resources – and relative silences can be telling.

Effective community power requires serious attention to the kinds of long-term investment that can build the capabilities of different communities, not only to set priorities and take decisions, but to work in more equal partnership with others to meet essential needs.

This should start with a recognition that communities across a highly unequal country can be worlds apart in terms of the existing assets and resources upon which they can draw. No amount of asset-based thinking can wish this away.

Once again, the most marginalised and depleted communities are at risk of being given responsibility without power.

Realising effective community power – to take decisions, do things and make change happen – requires resources, and because some communities will need more than others, a redistribution argument will also need to be advanced.

Without addressing this more explicitly, and in a context of near-universal praise for community spirit, the community power agenda risks becoming little more than a community responsibility agenda. Once again, the most marginalised and depleted communities are at risk of being given responsibility without power.

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