Let’s all get started: 5 steps to action | with Jon Alexander

Hey everyone and thanks for being here. Just let you know we're running a quick survey to see if listening to this podcast affects your sense of hopefulness. The links in the description. Thanks and enjoy the show. You know what I think we're missing that. What's that? Like you know a handbook, a kind of project 2025 except for nice people. Like a blow by blow guide for how to unscrew the world. Yeah, like we've dipped our toe in with a few tips here and there. But now it's time to get into the nitty-gritty. Exactly. Okay, so this episode is our best attempt at that handbook from what we've learned on our road trip. A first draft and just before we get started we're going to cover all our bases here with a nice neat disclaimer. The opinions expressed in this episode are the individual opinions of our hosts and our guests. And if you choose to take these opinions and change the world for the better with them, well, that is entirely up to you. Do it. In a time full of challenges, we're going to take you on a journey of the possible. I think the often we get told that you can't have that or we couldn't possibly do this, but we actually can. Stories that show how ordinary people can take matters into their own hands. We don't take no for an answer anymore so you just try and find the way around that. And create a future we all actually want to live in. One that could change our whole country. Just incredible to me. But it basically just been like, these guys aren't going to do it. We're just going to do it ourselves. You can find links to the things we mentioned on our website, antidotelive.studio, or videos on our social channels antidote live. Sometimes in a world that's not always working out. It's time to say, screw this. Let's try something else. So this episode we're going to break from format to dive deep and try and answer the question. If you did want to do something like this, well, what works? How does it work? Putting yourself out there on any level to create something in your community can feel uncomfortable and scary. But throughout this series we've seen so many uniting themes that are pretty damn useful playbook has begun to form. One that could turn the scary into the, well, achievable. So what follows is just that. We're going to hear from some of the incredible people we've met on our road trip around the UK. Mark, in Bristol, Josie, and Grimsby, Shala, and Shropshire, Lee in Northern Ireland, and Imi in Birmingham. Plus a few wise words from creator of Donut Economics, Kate Rayworth. We're going to assume you've met all of these folks by listening to our first five episodes. So if you haven't, you may want to go back and dive into those. And then with our special guest, John Alexander, author of the book Citizens. Someone who's really pushing to get our collective capacity for change out there into the world. And who's worked with hundreds of these types of projects will take you through the first five steps of doing something that could be world changing. And you can use these five steps for wherever you are in your journey. Maybe you're ready to take the ball by the horns and create something. Or maybe, and this is often the best place to start. You want to get involved in a project that's already going. And Matt, we've got a great tool for this. Yeah, see our postcode search tool at antidotelive.studio to find what amazing projects are already happening within five miles of your house. Or maybe you just want to tell your friends about it or bank all this useful info for later. Whatever your angle, you're welcome here. So let's get going. Step one. Find the others. Okay, so this first idea of find the others. Find other people. And that's something that you, John, you talk about a lot. Yeah, it sort of weirdly become a kind of catchphrase. Like there's a little bit of geekiness underneath it, right? And I always talk, as you know, about citizens not consumers. Like that is the kind of John hashtag. I'm very passionate about the word citizen. And people often say, like, don't talk about citizens because there are citizens and non-citizens, it becomes a kind of leak. And I'm like, we have to fight for that word. We need that word because the literal derivation of the word citizen actually is together people. It literally means like humans who don't mean anything unless they're with other humans. So to be a citizen is to find the others basically. Everybody lives somewhere. And you find yourself living where you are. So you can make a choice. You can either shut your front door, close your curtains, and I've nothing to do with your neighbourhood. Or you can be engaged in the life of the place that you live. We are not just alienated individuals in our little units of housing. We have a deep, deep connection to each other. If you're anywhere across the country and you're thinking, God, I'm too small to make a change. Most of the work that we've done started with a cup of tea. So there were nine of us doing this together, but nine of us who all have our own networks, families, friends, were tempted. They kind of really individualized us out. They did isolate everything on that. It's only nine people. It's not because everyone's bringing all those relationships and connections into the room with them as well. One of the things that's really evident is a lot of the time when you look around at how these things started. It starts over food or drink. Like Amy says it starts with a cup of tea in Carat Focus. They organised a meal to bring people together. And these are such simple things. Like meeting in a cafe, meeting in a pub. This is where this stuff starts. So you're not really waiting for like a tall wizard to show up to invite you on a quest to eat? The absolute opposite. There's not this sort of dramatic right. I'm going forth. There's just a thing that happens where they're like, I'm just going to host a dinner. I'm just going to invite someone around for a cup of tea. It's like the tiniest move often. It's so exciting to think about reframing that the place change starts to the kitchen table and the thing you need to start is a kettle, rather than what we think at the moment, which has changed start somewhere else far away from me. Because everybody has a kitchen table. So it gives us a framing to think about changing a way that is there for everyone. In the episode you've done it's Le Rob going like, I'm going to start a Facebook group with Billy. It's going to the council meeting and getting sufficiently frustrated that he has to stand up and say something and then saying let's go and clean a retreat and have a cup of tea. It's interesting to me to hear it because first it's obviously, it sounds so simple. But it is in a way exactly the opposite of what everything around us is trying to make us feel. Yes. Everything is trying to isolate us and make us feel alone or put us in individual units. And I can't help but think that just benefits us to say this quote. Whether by design or by default, it just helps keep things the way they are. Absolutely. The nature of the incentives in social media and so on is an attention economy. And you can't pay attention to social media if you're with other people. Ironically given that it's called social media. And you're right, the stories that surround us all the time. I started my career in the advertising industry. And the critical moment for me was when my first boss said what you've got to remember is the average consumer sees something like 3000 commercial messages a day. And all of those messages are coded with your consumer, your individual, pursue your individual self-interest. That is the background noise. And so yes, it is super hard to break out of that. And like I said when we talked about Lee and her story, it's both super hard and ridiculously simple. I think there's something here also about for those of us who maybe have wanted to try and bring about change. I do think for such a long time the messages we got was like it's not big enough. You're not really going to bring about change. This is not important enough. And I think sometimes it makes you feel like the simple action of sitting around a table with people you know and talking about where you are is just ridiculous. Like there's no way that's going to change things. But I think every single one of these stories, the thing that's amazing about them is that they do do that. They kind of break that spell that we've been cast under. There's a lovely phrase from the work on what's called asset-based community development which is one of the theory strands of this guy called Kormack Russell. One of the things that Kormack talks about is moving at the speed of trust. So the speed of trust is slow at the beginning because it is all about relationships. It's about opening conversations that might feel uncomfortable. But further down the line, the speed of trust is damn fast. Right, like once things are moving and the trust is there, it's exponential. And I think that's what all of your stories have shown actually. Like there is a sort of a beautiful smallness at the beginning because that's what it requires for people not just to trust each other but trust themselves that they can do it. But then once it builds, get out of the way. Another thing I think that is really empowering is you sometimes think you need a huge number of people. But all these stories show the core team is normally between eight and twelve people. And there's this amazing thing I've always held in the back of my mind when seeing all these stories that Jeff Bezos, when he started the big company he runs, had a rule that you were only allowed to have a team that you could feed with two pizzas. The idea being that you can then make decisions quickly, you can build that trust fast within a smaller group of people. And if you need a bigger team, you just have to have another team. You can't expand that team. And there's a whole thing about also about the number twelve condors. It's doesn't. That's why it's a jury. It's numbers, that sort of group sizes, like the smallest, the biggest number of people that can easily come to consensus. But that's such an empowering thing because you often think like you think in terms of change is like a petition maybe. And you might need to get a hundred thousand or a million signatures. But like if you're setting out to find other people, you share a passion for a place and some stuff that you care about. And you're only trying to find another eight or nine of them. That starts to make this change feel like not impossible. Which is why it is happening everywhere. It's really interesting to hear this idea though. is happening everywhere because when I think about I society as a whole, I find myself feeling like nothing is happening. And I guess I'm probably not alone in that. Is that just a real misconception? - Short answer, yes. (laughing) - Good, that's the right answer. - Like I show up somewhere, anywhere. And I'm like walking on the street and you just get a bit of an instinct and you see that there's a little group of people huddled round the table and you're like, oh, I know what that is. I've spent some time in a new city recently. And within two days I found six different community initiatives that no one told me with it. But I can explain the dynamic of it, right? Like I think it is back to the media, right? The radar of our media is tuned to the idea that power is in Whitehall and Westminster and Washington and Davos. And so that's where they send all the freaking cameras, you know? And this stuff doesn't get any attention in the parlance of the big name editors. Any one of these things is not a story. - Yep. - Right? Any one of these things is a cute exception to give five minutes on the end of the actual news. - Yeah. - And that's sort of in the nature of our storytelling today, I think, because we are trapped in this notion that change will be done for us rather than by us. And so I do think a huge challenge for this work, and one of the reasons I love you guys so much, is the storytelling, right? Like we have to find ways for this to come together to be visible. - Going around and seeing all this stuff, seeing the potential in all of the amazing stuff that's happening, like I'd stake my kids' future on this, not the stuff that's in the front of the news. So how do we get these stories to be the story, not to be the addendum on the end of the story? - Yeah. - 'Cause I think the next generations will live in a better world if we can do that. - Step two, ask what everyone wants. - So you've got your core group. One thing everyone does, in different ways, with postcards or surveys or knocking on doors, is go and ask a huge number of people, everyone in their community what they want. Like everybody that we've featured in all of this series has done this at a really big level. They've asked a lot of people, how important is that to get in this stuff to work? - I mean, I think it's huge. So this crucial moment when you go from, okay, we've got a little group of us around the table, we've got this energy, we're feeding off each other's energy, so this thing can sustain itself in some way. An idea might already have come up from that, that you can then verify, but it can also be like, what do we actually want? Like an open question. And that then gives people permission to reflect. You know, the ability to sit down and listen to a stranger is massive, it's massively important. I think that it gives us opportunities to blow apart the lie that we're all divided and that we all hate each other. It gives us an opportunity to see that actually, the opposite is true. But when you put this together, if you give us the opportunity, we're far more interested in caring for each other than we are in tearing each other down. I think the strategy can be replicated, do exactly what we've done, and that is concerned with local residents, just because we're a resident, don't mean they say that we know what other residents want. We're a bit of a resident, finding out what they think their problems are, bring them together like we did, and I said, what do you told us these are problems? What's the solutions? What do you think we need to do? Because like I said, your community, no where they want to get, empower those residents as much as you can. I think an important part of that is this sense that as that core group, you're not going in pushing a thing hard forward. You're going in doing this questioning, doing this listening. So it's a different, much more interactive thing that maybe you were used to where somebody's got a thing they want to bash through and they're trying to get everyone to support them. It's opening the thing up, making the invite feel invitational to everyone, including the people you might not normally feel invited in. Yeah, it begins by actively seeking some of the furthest, some of the conventionally furthest away. And whatever furthest away means, politically disability, like racial, socioeconomic, whatever. But why is it so important to reach that far away? What benefit does it really bring? What do we see? I mean, ultimately, I think it comes back to this concept of the speed of trust, right? Like it's, if you do something, you're just becoming another hero, you're doing something for people, and then expecting them to thank you for it. You're not doing it with them. And I think that this is another of my little catchphrases, all of us are smarter than any of us, right? And I think if you really start to do this work, you really believe that. Like I really believe that. There are ideas out there, and they come from different world views, right? And it's precisely because the world view is different that the view of the challenge or the opportunity will be different. And so you will get ideas from there that you won't get from people who you immediately affiliate with. If you get all of that information by knowing what everybody wants, you are just better equipped to do good stuff. Yeah. And secondly, because if you exclude at this stage, you've created like a deep vulnerability. To the idea. Because some people won't feel like they've had their say and therefore they'll resist it. They'll have been pushed out. If they feel it's been open to them and they chose not to step into it, that's very different to feeling that I've been excluded again. Yeah, that's true. And if you make them feel they've been excluded again, then. Then you're no different, I guess, than lots of the other things that have come before and have failed. Right. Because I think that is the nature of leadership in this world, is to hold questions, not provide answers. And to see your role as being to create the process and the space and the means for the answers to arise from everywhere. Because I guess part of this is, this isn't all easy or comfortable. But it's not hard in the ways that people think it's hard. Does that make sense? 100%. It's hard because sometimes maybe you have to reach out to people you wouldn't actually have a cup of tea with. Yeah, there's something I really want to say on this, though, which is, I think what is important is that you're asking about what the desirable thing is, what the future is, rather than asking what's wrong. This isn't about, let's analyse, the greatest problem of the world. That's just like a really important distinction, actually. Because that is generally how, like a central government assessment works or whatever, right? It tells the problems. It's an index of multiple deprivation that tells you just how crap everything is. And I'll give you my second callback rustle, is it mine? I knew I'd go to callback again. You have to imagine the Irish accent. But he has this lovely thing, it's to start with what's strong, not with what's wrong, and then use what's strong to fix what's wrong. It's not like-- I've got some good lines. I know, right? Yep. So this is the thing you're really trying to do when you're asking the community what they want. You're not directing their energy into the negative. You're not mobilising them behind your answer. You might be offering a possibility into that space. But most likely, you're saying something along the lines of, "What if Grims B, what if East Marsh could be, a place you were really proud to live? What would it take to get there?" And even if there's a specific idea that what a framing can really help, there's a purposefulness, but also a likeness to that kind of frame, I think, that lets people come in. You're not asking them for a solution. I may have one, but that's what I hear is you're asking them for the kind of life they want to live. Yeah, and some of that is a creative question. It's like there's this idea that we lack these spaces to come together and dream and imagine. But once you start coming together and talking to people, that's kind of what you're doing. You're talking about what do you want your area to be like? Yeah, yeah. I think there's another aspect to this as well. We also have this tendency to want to do the right thing with a capital TR and T, right? Our educations are conditioning, you've told us that you have to analyze and pick the most important intervention point. And so that's what drives us into this kind of problem identification narrative. And this work really is the opposite of that. It's not about doing the right thing. It's about doing the thing that enables energy to flow and trusting that that will then become the right thing. And that's really what's underneath the callmex, like little aphorism, right? Start with what's strong. Don't ignore what's wrong, but don't start with it. And then use what's strong to fix what's wrong. It does feel like though sometimes you can feel like there's no time to do this. Because the scale of the thing we're trying to solve are so urgent. And I hear this a lot out there. I feel this sometimes myself and I battle with it. Do we have time to do all of this? Like, or do we just need to get on with it? And I guess what I'm asking is, why is that not effective in your experience? To just say, hey look, we don't have time to ask all these people and do all this stuff. We just got to do it. - I mean, the first thing I'm thinking of is that lovely phrase, like times are urgent. We must slow down, which is the bio-channel affairs in it, though Nigerian philosopher. But yeah, I get you, right? Like there's this thing of like the strong man leader, the strong leader with a man or otherwise, delivers the answer, steps into the complexness and imposes order on it. One person imposing their will on a situation is never gonna be as effective as people coming together and building together. - 'Cause it works. Because everywhere we've been that has shown these amazing examples, that's what they've done. and they've all succeeded. There's a level of humility. If you ask Mark what he wants to do in his area, he'll tell you he doesn't know because he hasn't asked anyone recently. They're not just paying lip service to these ideas. They genuinely want to hear them and that is what's driving them. And then the other side of that, if you're someone who's receiving that question, that's something special too, right? I get so rare for anyone to really ask us what we truly deeply want. Absolutely. You're not at the core of it. You're creating, you're offering joy, right? Like the act of asking a question is the act of inviting someone into some agency that far too few of us have had for far too long? And that's just a gift and why not give it to as many people as possible? Step three, build your vision and know your values. OK, so we've got our small group of people. Now we've asked everyone what they want. We've got a real vibe of where the support lies. One of the things people have said, a lot of the groups we've visited spend a lot of time understanding what the vision and values of that community are. What vision are they trying to get to and what values do they want to get there with? And they write them down. They literally have a list. We've spent a lot of time on the values and understanding why we're doing what we're doing and what full. It's like, if you wouldn't get in a car and drive to car more if you didn't have a map, because how would you know to get there? We've got five values. We are joyful. Imaginative, genuine, empathic and trusting. We are joyful because we're doing this with joy and love. We are imaginative because you've got to think it before you can do it. We are empathic because human connection is really important. We're genuine because we say what we mean and we mean what we say. And we trust each other, we trust the universe, we trust people. People know their experts in their own lives, trust them to know what they want and need. These words, they underpin everything that we do and we look at everything that we do and go, what else is come back to our values? One of our values at full tall is to, is to sow the seed and that is to kind of just try things out and not be afraid to fail and to try something new. But what's most important is that we learn from what we do and we share that learning. This thing of the values is you've opened and now you need to build some determination and to do that you have to understand what holds you together. And often we hear about values either in business where they're almost like the thing that you're not doing. It's like, oh, let's write innovations our value because we're really not doing innovations. But this is, you're taking them seriously. You're like, we're going to identify how we're going to do things. What is our compass? We're going to do it in a way that involves or respects everyone. We're going to do it in a way that thinks about future generations, whatever it might be. And that's going to be our actual compass. Not it's going to be a slogan on the wall or just making it superficial. And that's so, we all have values. That's how we make all of our decisions. But that isn't how we run our society at the moment. So we're not used to seeing them actually taken seriously. You know what I really like about this is it really flies in the face of something that we keep being told, which is that we're too different from each other. We don't have the same values as those people. What I'm hearing is bring that diversity in and then set these values, which means it is possible, which means we're not so far away from one another. I think it really challenges that narrative, that somehow there are like British values that are uniquely for white people and that no one else can be a part of it. When actually these communities are diverse. And in so many ways, not just race and by coming together and doing this and then setting your values, you kind of disprove that idea that we don't have the same values. And another thing I want to address is that there may be some people listening and thinking, why do this now? Why not get on with it and just get doing the thing? And yeah, probably some of this stuff is going to happen side by side. But the reason to do it early is that vision and values are protective. If you work out what is important to you early on, things are less likely to splinter halfway down the line. And Charlotte from Fordhull Farm talked to us about this. You can get bound up in a lot of detail and you can disagree on a lot of things. But actually, if you do your vision first, it's very hard to disagree on things because really, at any given point in time, you're always going towards that same vision. So it stays very aligned and very cohesive and actually even when there's disagreement. Because you're all going to the same place, it just works. And it's a huge strength and a huge resilience to have that. So here, vision and values give you a way to respond quickly when you're thinking what else you could do. The vision and values give you a way you've already agreed to to say, well, we could try this, bang, it fits the values, let's do it, or no, it doesn't. Maybe we should think again. Yeah, it gives you a structure for that conversation. If that is a concern that's coming up, we have a way to talk about it and find a different way of addressing it. Step four, decide on a thing to do. So we've got our group of people. We've asked everyone what they want. We've understood our values, how are we going to do it? What we're going to do? I mean, that's kind of the question, right? And maybe it comes in parallel with the values thing and maybe you're starting to sense into something already, but there is a moment of commitment. There is a moment where that first thing to do, whether it's like create a magazine or start a community energy thing or create a green graysaw or whatever, there's something tangible, real in the world that people in that place will interact with. And ultimately, none of this is real without that. You're not going to be able to deliver everything that everybody wants, but like I say, by looking outside of your local area, finding what funding streams are out there, finding what the current trendy agenda is at current time, see if any of those things, those assets, matches up with what it is you want to deliver. There's lots of things you want to deliver, but we could only concentrate on those that were doable. And by saying doable, the support was there, the funds were there, the opportunity was there. It feels really nice and right to have built something really concrete that you can actually touch. It gives you a lot of credibility because there's a lot of people just sitting at their desk, doing research and writing papers and thinking that they're influenced and changed. And actually, we just need people to build real stuff. People keep coming up to me and say, when's the next book? When's the next book? And I'm not writing an next book. You know, what the world needs is action. Let's do it. There's been a lot of conversation about building something, like doing something tangible, something that demonstrates the way you want the world to be using Audrey Tang's language. Yeah, 100%. The moment of commitment is when the world starts to sort of move to you, right? We all know this in our own lives, when you actually commit in a direction, then your mindset changes. And making it something physical and real and in space is so crucial because what we are talking about is communities, real geographical communities, physical places. And so something that people can interact with and go to and walk past and know is there, is essential to this. This is where we stray a little closer to the kind of the world of art, right? So Brian Eno talks about world-making and like, rehearsing the future. That's what this is. Guy D'Argie, that wind turbine in Lawrence Weston is an artwork, actually, because it carries an idea of a different future. That's what the green grocer is as well. I love that idea of connecting it with art as a kind of physical manifestation of the world you want to create and the ideas will tie up in that and the physicality. Yeah, there's something about thinking about it like that, that allows it to be a bit imperfect because art in a way is beautiful because it's not always perfect. And so I love that tying it together like that. Everything we're talking about is creating the world you want to live in. And there's something really powerful in that, because you're not sitting in a room and having an argument about ideas. You're not debating in a political sphere what could or couldn't be, you're just doing the thing. And it may or may not work and it may or may not work perfectly. But the end-- But you commit to have a thing. And you'll have a thing. I do think that's the thing with all the stories that we've gone to and that you've taken me on this road trip on, Matt, that has struck me. It's how you can touch the things that people have made and are creating and are building. There's something about it being undeniable. Once you've done it, the debate isn't no longer valid. It's like, could the wind turbine work to bring in 100 grand a year? Well, yeah, we've done it. Like, you can't dispute that anymore. And there it is. The indisputability of the outcome feels like a hugely powerful thing, especially in a world where we're divided into having arguments on social media, which are all hypothetical. There's a wind turbine. The power is here. I have power. I have agency. And that is a muscle that once you start to use and once you start to see the results of, you want to use it more and you want to build it more. I think that is the thing for me that seems quite exciting is that it feels like this has a snowball effect on the individual and on the community where you maybe felt disengaged or overwhelmed before, but you do this thing and you get a little bit of it and then it builds and it builds and it builds. And I think that is, can be transformative, actually. Yeah. I think that's an important thing to recognize as well in the stories we've seen. When you go to that first, asking what people want, you might come up with a list of things people want, but you don't have to start with the biggest one. Like in Lawrence, Western, they first tried to get a supermarket and Mark says when we had that and people could see it, feel it, touch it, kick it, then that built the belief that they could do more. So the wind turbine wasn't the first thing they did. Like you can start small and build that muscle, build that confidence. I guess build the trust, right? Because then you can do the bigger, more ambitious things because the trust is there and you can, can be faster. - You know when we were in Lawrence, Western, and there was some pressure from the community, like some dude just cleaning up garbage, and we asked Mark, is he part of our vicious, Lawrence, Western? And he was like, no, but since we started doing some stuff, he started doing this stuff and he just loves it. Oh, that's amazing. Like he's like signed up to your organization and he hasn't come to a meeting. But you've kind of given him permission in a way to go and do the thing that he cared about, which is cleaning up this garbage in his community, and he's done it. And his Mark talking about this guy, his name's Andy, opening the new community center. - So when we opened Ambition House, - Yes. - Obviously a lot of people were involved in that, and a lot of people were saying, "Oh, we need to get a politician down to cut the ribbon." We said, "No chance, it's gonna be a resident." But who'd you pick out of all those residents? - Right. - So we had a guy called Annie Sheeramon, he's locally known as Andy Binns, who does all the litter picking. He did one anything to do with our organization, all of these friendly with us, 'cause we'd given them the bags and we'd given the litter pickers. But he wanted to do his own thing. So that was ideal. He's somebody not associated with Ambition Lawrence Weston, but he was doing a lot of good work in the community. So we got in to cut the ribbon. - This I see everywhere as well. There's a citizen in all of us that's just so hungry for things to start to change. What it will mean is that when something tangible real is there, that will unlock something in far more people even that are involved in that one thing. - They're not waiting, because they don't need to be. - I mean, you not wait, so there I'll have to wait. - There you go, right? - Okay, we have to talk about the metaphorical elephant in the room, money, right? This is all great, but what about money? 'Cause that is probably the thing that, if you're listening to this, you're thinking, but where do we get the money to do all of this? - I think the first thing I would say on this is that, that the money question doesn't have to be at the beginning. A lot of the organizations I've come across and worked with the litter picking, the whole point of that is it doesn't require money. To cook a meal together does not require money. I mean, it requires a little bit of money, but if you club together and ladies, and starting to build the energy, starting to do something doesn't. Now, when we get to the point of like, we need a green grocer, we need minimum 25 grand. We're gonna buy 10 houses on the street, we need 500 K. We're gonna, like, yes, then money is there. But let's just first say, once you commit, you then see that challenge in whole different ways. And you start to be like, okay, where can it come from? What can we reimagine? So the Lawrence Western story where you go, we don't have anything, but we have a bit of land and hang on that number on that bit of land, is nowhere near what it should be. So let's reinterpret that and we can do that. - Yeah, that is an incredible story of ingenuity. So the way Ambitioner and its Western raised money for their community center, when they had to work out where to ask for the supermarket, where the community wanted. The resulting plan meant reclassifying the derelict land from their old college as mixed use, which raised its sale value by a few million quid. So they then asked for some of that back to fund a new community center. I mean, talk about creative. - Right, and there are foundations that are funding this kind of work. One place people should look, it was called social change nests. You don't have to form an organization in order to receive money anymore. The founder of social change nests has this lovely line. She says the revolution will not be incorporated. (laughing) And there will be people in your local area. There are community foundations who are in every county in this country that have funds that they should be investing in this kind of work. But I love this phrase, money follows good ideas. And money follows commitment. - That's the thing we have heard reflected back to us. If you do those first steps, you've got a good motivated core team. You've asked everyone what they want and you've created a vision that everybody wants to back and is clear, then people start to kind of step in and support. And that may not initially be financially, but you start to catalyze people around this good idea. - And then ask everyone because you never know who knows someone who knows someone so often. I've heard stories of like the cousin of the guy in the corner of the thing who never spoke at meetings, but seemed to come to all of them and know when you were, he was there. It just turns up one day with a hundred grand. It's another reason for that kind of openness at the beginning because you never know the more people feel part of this thing, the more likely you are to find those unlikely connections. - There's two things that we've heard, I think that have really, when we talk about money on the road that we've heard that released it out for me, one of them is from Imi and I agree with her and I've experienced this myself, which is we're so in a scarcity mindset. There's not enough resource, there's not enough resource. And actually you have to change that and be like, "No, lots of people have lots of money." And they're maybe not held in the right places, but it exists. And I think the minute you're like, "Oh, it actually does exist out there," that's different than thinking there's not enough. Someone is holding onto it, it's there. - Yeah, and that is not cool. And actually we need some wealth taxes and we need things to change really fundamentally and I'm very happy to say that. (laughs) - And then the other thing I loved when we were talking to Mark in ambition Lawrence Western was the way he leveraged the resource he was able to get. And I thought this was so smart. He said, "Well, we knew that if a company wanted to do this winter by and they would just hire these consultants and these consultants would go and write the bid and then get the big money." And so all we had to do was get enough money to hire the same consultants. And it was like a light bulb for me because I think sometimes when you're working, quote-unquote, in community, which for a lot of people that were, it's like a progioros like it's a belittling term. You're supposed to be like, "Oh, we did a bake sale. We've got 500 quid isn't all over money, but we've got it together." Instead of being like, "I wonder what the big companies do. Let's just do what they're gonna do." It was just really for me amazing because I think sometimes we think we do not have the right or the access to what the guys who are trying to make the world worse have access to. We have access to those things too. I always think of the East Marsh United community share offering half a million quid on the East Marsh. There's a lot of money, but putting that up and going, we can buy a load of houses with this and we can create something really sustainable and really ongoing. And that is one hell of a business proposition. - Yeah. - Fight. - Yes. - Back up people. 'Cause-- - Yeah, this is not just like, it's not a nice idea to do. - This ain't too. This isn't like, you're gonna feel fuzzy. This is smart. - This is not charity. - Yes, exactly. - I think that's maybe a really important thing to do. - That's right. - This is not like, this is not arms for the poor. This is not let the little people eat for a day. This is transference of power. - Well, it's every one of the projects we've been to see shifts money and that will in theory make these things get easier. All of the things we've been to see have some element of community well-spiriting. They're shifting the flow of money back into the community, meaning it might be really hard to start, but it's gonna make it easier. That money starts coming back in. And that's the business plan. - Well, it stacks up. - Right, and actually if we zoom out and look globally for a minute and think about community wealth building as an approach, we need a different model of economic development because at the moment, even if we can measure growth, it's not felt by huge numbers of people. There's a famous essay that was published during the US election called The Death of Deliverism, where they were basically noting that, although you could publish the numbers that said that the economic performance in the US under Biden had got significantly better, that was not translating. And that's because it's not felt in those communities. And so community wealth building on that macro scale, community wealth building is becoming a massive thing. Scotland is about to pass the world's first community wealth building bill. All 32 of the local authorities have now have to have community wealth building strategies. This got passed on February the 10th, 2026, by the way, just a week after our recording. - There is a minister for community wealth and South Korea is talking to the Scots about following that path. The existing systems are failing. They are in collapse and people are starting to look at that big level for different ways of doing things. And these approaches, the sorts of things that you guys have told the stories of, are examples of what the major national and multilateral institutions are starting to notice they're gonna have to come behind. It is happening. It's not there yet. But when it happens, this whole thing transforms. We are living in an enormous time. - Yeah, we're living in one of the biggest transfers of wealth in the next couple of years than we've ever seen, too, I think, a generation who doesn't feel as much. - Who recognized that it's screwed. - Yeah, so if they're screwed, what's the point of being screwed with 10 billion, really, it's not gonna buy you anything. - Let's do something else. - Step five, trust yourselves. - So step five is trust yourself, right? Like it's, and that's based on the idea that there isn't a right way of doing this. There just is not a right way. - Yeah, so we're often in this mindset that we need to learn stuff or have skills to be able to do this stuff. But we exist in this really liberating moment where so much of what we can see, economically, socially, isn't working for so many of us that we really can come together and have better ideas. If you do get 10 people around a kitchen table, it's totally possible to create an economic approach that's gonna be better than the one that defines our entire culture. And that's a really liberating thought. Like you can trust that the wisdom that comes out of the process we've already been through is probably gonna unlock some things that might be way better than anything we live with at the moment. It's right to look to others and learn from them and go visit them. But then it's right to come home, find your others, and decide what to do together. Like, and not feel like you need to find the right thing. All of it comes back to, like, trust the core. If you have built those relationships, if you've looked out to the community, if you are genuinely rooted in doing something that is genuinely of that place for that place by that place, trust yourself. Everywhere you go, community is no exactly what they need, whether they're fighting for their local pub, telling you the importance of their sure starts and to fill in out those parks on a hot summer's day. I think the narrative of what's possible is really important. It's very sad to see how much creativity and opportunity is squashed and made to believe that it's not possible. It's a real shame because, actually, when you empower us as a community to create our own solutions, magic happens, become resourceful, become creative, and we find solutions, where solutions might not have existed before. We would have thought that a small and proverish community like Lance Weston would have built the tallest winter of our England, built their own community center, built in their own 38 affordable homes. I mean, what we've achieved is massive. We've got a really low skill set, low knowledge set. We've got no money, but yet we've still managed to do it. So there's no reason that any other community, similar to ours, can't go on and achieve great things, like the residents of Lawrence Weston have. It feels like there's not a contradiction, but something here that you have to almost call out, which is that the trust yourself comes at the end of the process, not at the beginning. You need to go and talk to people. You need to have those conversations with others. You need to build those values. It's once you've created that foundation, then you trust yourself as opposed to what used to be the dominant way of doing things, which was just like, I know what I'm doing. I'm going to go out on my own and do it, because I trust myself. Having never spoken to a single person around you and just being like, so it feels like it's the other way around than what we've-- - You've earned a trust by building the connections, the relationships, the knowledge, the listening. - Even earned it for yourself. Like, yeah, absolutely not just earned it for the people around you, but you earned it for yourself. And your trust is not built on an individualistic vision of yourself as a hero. It's built on actual work that you've done. - Right, it's like that phrase, "Lord, give me the confidence of a mediocre white man." - Yes. - That is not what we're talking about. It's the trust yourself of, look in the mirror and know you've done the work. Know you've built the relationships. Know you've had the conversations. Know you are coming from love of your place. - It feels to me like it's, to some extent, trusting the collective instincts of the group of people you've brought together and listened to, that somewhere in that, your thing of, "All of us are smarter than any of us?" - "All of us are smarter than any of us." The outcome of that is really powerful. Everybody doing this feels like they're making it up. They all feel like they don't know what they're doing. They all feel like they all say, we were building the ship as we were saving it. So you don't, even after everything we've said so far, you don't feel like you know what you're doing. You just, so that's why this point is so important. It's like, but you can trust that something that comes out of that is better than what we're living in right now. - Oh man. - And this can involve, probably you will involve, making some mistakes. - Failing is the only way path to success. And it's the only path to finding some really good solutions. It was only by doing that first and learning from it. Did it open up the next door for where we ended up? So we have to go through that journey. You have to make some mistakes to be successful. And I think any successful entrepreneur or anyone else would tell you the same thing. We need to kind of allow our children and our society to kind of like to make mistakes, to play and fall over to her ourselves because it's only by doing that to be kind of understand how to assess risk, manage risk, take up opportunity and learn from it. And it's a really important skill that I feel that we're losing because we're just getting too scared. - It isn't all gonna work. And one of the things we've spotted a lot from the stories we've heard is that you get pushback and often the pushback comes from the place you'd least expect. - Yeah, someone will roll out the cynicism at you at your absolute peak. You'll get shot down in a horrible way. That will happen. Just when things feel like they're beginning to flow, you'll lose a funder. - Yeah, exactly. I think it's like realizing it's not about you. It's about what people have experienced for a really long time. - And that you're not doing it alone. - Yes. - That's part of why it's important that you do this as a group because you can share that load. And it doesn't feel so personal. - Yeah, so I do think this idea of finding that small group that first step that we talked about is also like a protective mechanism to protect from like burnout and exhaustion for everyone there. - Well, and it's important to reflect like that pushback is gonna come and you can share that load. And the other thing you gain from that is it's fun. Like you're doing this with people. - Yeah, I mean, I think it's not terrible, but there has to be an element of fun to it, right? - Yeah, I kind of almost prefer the word joy. - Yeah, so I agree. - Joy is like a deeper thing, right? You're choosing to be alive, actually. Like it's easy to be dead in this time. It's like-- - Yeah, disengaged, numb, just hopeless. - Right. - And by doing this, you are like, and choosing to be alive means you are lining yourself up for some punches. Because you're choosing to feel. And choosing to like, choosing to step into it. But everyone, everyone who I've met, and I know everyone who you guys have met, would I think recognize that? They've chosen this and would say very strongly that the ups of it far outweigh the downs. The fact of doing something that feels real and meaningful and worthwhile in this time gives a sense of life that once you start doing it, once you start feeling it, you can't imagine going back. - Amazing. Do you have any more final things you wanna say? - These things that we're offering aren't like, do this in this way and done it out. They're like, this seems to be what's going on, but I just wanna re-emphasize that. If you can look in the mirror and authentically say to yourself, I know I am operating from love of place and from love of the people here. I am coming from love in this. You won't go far wrong. - So this is it, the end. - Yeah, it's been quite a journey. I set out on this tour to see if by seeing up close and personal, a lot of the amazing stuff that's happening around the country and would shift something in me, shift a kind of deep sense of belief in what's possible. And to share that with a lot of other people too. But I also wanted to see how it would shift something in you. How has that worked out? - It's definitely shifted things in me. I've definitely gone from feeling like there's nothing out there, nothing is working, everything is just really doom and gloom to realizing that there is amazing stuff happening all around the country and we just don't know about it. And knowing about it, just in and of itself, has such a transformative impact because now I feel like I have another narrative, a really positive, hopeful, optimistic and grounded one. All of a sudden you're just not left with the dominant narrative that everything is going bad. You have tangible real world examples of everyday people making a change and it working. Everyone we speak to talks about what they're doing next, how this is spreading, how they're not the only ones and there's a contagiousness about this. That feels really exciting. And now I said this was the end, but maybe it's also not. - Yeah, there's some exciting plans in the work. So keep your eye on our feed over the coming weeks. 'Cause one of the things we've realized making this is how powerful these stories are and how many more people need to hear them. - I mean, that tsunami of negative noise. - Exactly. So we're gonna keep working on this, but to help us, we wanna hear from you. What is hearing these stories done for you? There's a survey in the show notes and it really help us if you could fill it in. So please take a moment to do that. And also, let us know, do you wanna hear more of these stories because we think so much more is possible. - And some bigger names in the world of storytelling have started to realize that too. - All to come. And in the meantime, thank you so much for coming on this journey with us. We cannot wait to hear what you're up to. So please get in touch and tell us what you're getting started on. - Or tell your friends about us, spread some positivity. Let's get started. - The world we live in is based on ideas and rules we made up. But together, we can make up better ones. Good things happening all around us. And in little ways together, we build big things. In a time of massive division, we need to find these things that bind us, the things we all need, food, energy, housing, input and decision making and work together on them. - So visit our website at antidotelive.studio. - To use our new postcode search tool, it'll show you what collective action that could lead to big change is already happening within five miles of your house. And if there isn't any, it'll give you tips from folks who've already done this and how you can get started. Or follow us on social media. antidotelive on Instagram and antidote underscore live on TikTok. - And you can tell us what you're up to there. We'd love to hear it. - Screw this, let's try something else. It's an antidote studio and immediate production. is produced with and directed by Matt Coulter. holding and me to a slender fear, with additional writing by Marion Pasha. Our editor in line producer is Alex Schend, additional editing by Kristen Monauts, sound designed by Steve Rafter, our executive producers and Michelle Whitehead and Ben Yard. - We'd love it if you could take a minute to give us a five-star review on Apple or Spotify. - And remember, the stories we tell ourselves shape the world we live in. So if you found this podcast inspiring and wanna do one thing to change the world today, tell someone else about it and let's grow this momentum for change.