Organising for a fairer UK, together.
Every winter, some public bodies slip significant consultations out just as civic life winds down, with deadlines that land before most of us have found the recycling calendar. Here’s how to spot the pattern, challenge a cramped window and turn a quiet deadline into a loud accountability question.
School holidays do not pause a campaign so much as reveal who is carrying the care. This is a practical case for putting term dates, childcare and low-effort holiday tasks at the centre of coalition planning — not as an afterthought, but as organising infrastructure.
Planning applications are often the first public signal of what is about to change on your street, but council portals are built for compliance, not clarity. This is a practical guide to finding the real deadline, decoding the design and access statement, checking who has already commented, and turning one application into a standing neighbourhood watch.
The Christmas switch-on is one of the few moments when half the neighbourhood is in one place, looking at the same thing. Here’s how to read it like an organiser — and turn the applause into a January agenda with names, asks and a date in the diary.
Somewhere in a drawstring bag there's a hire agreement asking for five million pounds of public liability cover, and a campaign that hasn't started yet. A plain-English guide to insurance, risk assessments, safeguarding and cancellation clauses — and how coalitions can stop small print from choosing who gets to meet.
Ramps are the easy bit. The harder questions are about toilets, noise, ticket costs, travel and quiet space — and whether disabled members helped design the answers. This is a practical access audit for campaigns that want to mean it.
Most coalitions count who turns up and then treat the count as consent. But the people who can give up a Tuesday evening are rarely a fair sample of the street, the ward or the tenant group. Here's how to redesign decisions so power doesn't depend on being in the room at 7pm.
Council budgets are public documents, but they are written to be survived rather than read. Here is a practical way to gather neighbours, decode the jargon, find the cuts hiding in the appendices, and leave with a shared set of demands rather than a room full of confusion.
Any other business is meant to be housekeeping, but too often it becomes the back door through which a campaign is quietly rewritten. Here is a practical safeguard kit for UK groups who want the last ten minutes to stop deciding the next ten months.
A vacant high street unit can give a campaign a front door, a kettle and a reason for people to drop in. But a meanwhile lease is not a magic wand — it is a set of trade-offs. Here’s how to negotiate one that serves the organising, not the landlord’s brochure.
Winning the keys to a council building feels like the end of a campaign. It's the start of a tenancy of a very different kind — one with a Victorian boiler, a compliance diary and a repair bill nobody put in the business plan. Here's how coalitions get through their first winter without falling out or freezing.
Digital-first campaigns are brilliant at counting clicks and useless at noticing who never saw the post. Here is a practical offline reach audit for UK coalitions — where to post, who to ask, how to make a poster survive the weather, and how to tell whether any of it worked.
Every coalition ends up with three megaphones and no accessible ramp. A shared equipment library is less about storage than about trust — a practical way for UK groups to stop buying duplicates and start acting like one movement. Here is how to set one up so it actually gets used.
Emergency food aid is one of the best-organised acts of solidarity in the country, and it is not a plan. Here's what changes when a neighbourhood stops managing a queue and starts writing a food strategy of its own.
Every campaign has one person who knows the caretaker's mobile number, the bank's security questions and which councillor actually replies to emails. When they go, the group often goes with them. Here's how to spread the keys around before you have to.
Every few years the council chamber changes hands, and every few years community groups get quietly sorted into friends and enemies by people who've never read their asks. Here's an opinionated survival guide to surviving a change of political control without losing your residents.
Every campaign has a membership that exists on paper and a membership that can physically get through the door. The gap between the two is usually a bus timetable. Here's how to audit travel, budget for it properly, and stop letting fares decide who gets a say.
The pub, the laundrette, the library counter — none of them appear in a campaign plan, and all of them carry the relationships that make one possible. A look at how UK organisers work with the spaces they don't own, and how to do it without wearing out the welcome.
Every campaign recruits the same handful of jobs and then wonders why it stalls six months in. Here are the five roles that actually decide whether a local coalition lasts — and how to spot the people already doing them unpaid.
Plenty of campaigns call themselves community-led; far fewer could survive a straightforward morning at a bus stop. This is a practical audit for organisers who want to move past consultation theatre and find out who their campaign is genuinely built for — and who it quietly locks out.