The WDCO constitution review – WDCO’s mission

[Adrian Essex]

WDCO is the body that represents residents’ views in the partnership made up of WDCO, Berkeley Homes, The London Borough of Hackney and Notting Hill Genesis.

It has been agreed that the constitution that underpins the proceedings of WDCO should be reviewed and I am part of the working group beginning to do so.

The approach we have agreed upon as a first step is to look at the Vision and Mission Statements which preface the constitution.

 

Mission Statement of the Woodberry Down Community Organisation

 Our aim is:

1.  to create the kind of community we envisage together with the physical environment which is most conducive to its achievement by securing the active, positive, vigorous and ongoing involvement of each and every section of the Woodberry Down community and all other present and potential partners.
2.  to work for the provision of excellent housing, education, employment, health, leisure and retail opportunities to all residents.

 

 Unfortunately this mission becomes impossible in the very first phrase “to create the kind of community we envisage”

Hackney tell us that “The regeneration of Woodberry Down was first planned in the 1990s . . “ – a different era. How have times changed since the 1990s? Let us count the ways.

• Until the early 1990s there was net emigration from the UK, only in the mid 90s did that balance change
• The IBM pc was around in the 1990s, but clunky and mainly used for businesses.
• The Sony Walkman was cutting edge.
• We didn’t get the Apple iphone until 2007.
• In 1999 the internet had 248 million users, roughly 4% of the world’s population, today it has approaching 6 billion users, c70% of the world’s population.
• The attack on the Twin Towers in New York was in 2001.
• World Governments’ mishandling of the Covid crisis was recent, I’d rather not remember when.
• And war has raged all around the world, with or without UK involvement, most recently right on the very borders of the EU, a body set up especially to prevent such a thing.

So the question in my mind is what sort of community do we now envisage? And there, just knocking tentatively on the firnges of my mind, is what sort of community should we be envisaging for next year?

I'm not alone in having this question mind. This illustration is taken from a presentation given to the board in December about a feasibility study for a library in Phase 4. Writ large is the recognition that much has changed, and is about to change again

[Kevin Lau]

Adrian and Hilary has nicely summed up my thoughts on this matter. I will not repeat what is said, but this is a textbook case about how communities need to have a focal point that bonds residents together other than nationality and citizenship. A hundred years ago, people went to the same church or school, married local, and then died local. These days, the nearest pub is not even the local watering hole for thirsty residents. WDCO could be at the centre of Woodberry Down, but it needs to be relevant to residents.

 

Primary Purpose of WDCO

The origins of Woodberry Down was about providing good quality social housing for working Londoners and their families. That was Herbert Morrison's vision for Hackney (and for London). That is what WDCO seems to be continuing to build on, albeit dicussions can be repeititive and tiresome.

I often wonder whether Herbert Morrison would still recognise Woodberry Down in its current form? And I think he still would. 

 

 

Secondary Purpose - specically the social welfare of residents 

But WDCO needs to look into ways to continue to be relevant after the completion of the regeneration development, sometime in 2035/40.

WDCO could do more to promote and enable community engagement and activities that reflect the interest of the wider population. In particular, it would be great if there was clearer ways to engage with the Manor House Development Trust in developing ways for residents to engage with each other. 

There are many things that residents can do in the comfort of their home, but as time goes on people come and go. Building a new community from scratch takes time and energy, and those windows of opportunities are limtied because it depends on the rarity of enablers to make these changes happen.

There are many residents who have moved into Woodberry Down as young working professionals, and many have voiced an interest in living in the area for longer than the average tenancies of 18-24 months. Giving residents the opporunity to meet and network with each other means that we are enabling them to develop their own pocket community. WDCO should make sure we have the right enablers to reach easy to ignore groups. 

Lots of things are legislated, such as sustainbility and equality & diversity. Do we really need to repeat what is now expected of all of us? I would have thought if such a vision and mission statement did include this statement, one would naturally expect the establishment of a Women's, LGBTQ+, BAME, Disability and such to be represented. WDCO should make sure that it is representative of the wider population in its decision making, not just a single constiuency (such as retirees or Arsenal fans).

 

 

How do we achieve this?

Better communications and being more visible. Updarting the website and formalising the way it communicates to residents. Facebook Groups/WhatsApps and other social media sites are not the right approach, and are ultimately exclusionary. If the Gen Zs were in charge, WDCO would be conducted via TikTok or Snapchat. Unfortunately, this takes time and energy from our volunteers. It is neither glamourous nor technical, but it is time consuming. 

WDCO would benefit from looking into how sports clubs and other membership organisations are organised.

Perhaps incorporation could help us achieve better outcomes in engaging with residents? The chair of each Residents' Assocaition could have a proper @wdco.org.uk email address, thereby providing greater legitamacy and continuity in handovers.

If WDCO was a proper charity, we could utilise Google's free Nonprofits services and be used to help develop the organisation better. But that would mean that we would have to abide by the Charity Commission's rules and regulations, which may be too much for a small organisaiton like ours. 

We need the right frameworks and safeguards to make sure that the organisation works well and is not mismanaged. But in the grand scheme of things, this might be overly ambitious and requires long-term work.

Perhaps we could draw on the rich history of how many members clubs drew subscription of funds and bought their local clubs 

 

 

Final thoughts

I suspect that the majority of residents in Woodberry Down have a fairly neutral opinion of WDCO because they simply do not know enough to make an informed opinion. With that attitude in mind, I suspect that in about 10-15 years' time, most of the developments will be managed either by R&R (private) or NHG (HA), with very little involvement of WDCO. I don't even think my residential estate management company does have any connections with WDCO directly. 

If WDCO wants to be relevant and not managed out by the partners, it would be important for WDCO to think how it can encourage further and better engagement, particularly with the next phase of development. 

I'm not changing the narrative of WDCO, it is a very good story about how building new and better homes can improve lives. But WDCO needs to remain relevant to the partners aside from the tickbox exercise of "engagement". 

[Hilary Britton]

Adrian, I agree with you. Particularly about the opening phrase. And the problem is that everyone has their own idea of community. Some people see Woodberry as where they happen to live and think it is a very pleasant place to live but feel they have their own community of friends etc and do not particularly want or need to feel  closely involved with the community here and may not plan to be here for long anyway. Others, who have lived here all their lives and have been to school together etc, feel the sense of community they have always had very strongly and want to maintain it. And then there is everyone in between!  What WDCO should be seeking is to provide, as the mission statement does in fact say, is an environment conducive to enabling everyone here to have a chance of satisfying their individual requirements. I do not really think one can make a community - it just develops over time but is harder when there is a transient population. It is the people living here who will over time find other people with whom they have interests in common who will then perhaps organise places to meet up and do things together. OF course there are some things that are more obvious that could be offered if we thought there would be demand. For example this morning I spoke with two Mums with very young babies in the coffee shop and asked whether there was anything that they would like to see on the estate. they said they had found the child centre over by the John Scott Health centre very useful. But one said that it would be nice to have some sessions available at the Redmond Centre for Mums with very young babies and she would be prepared to pay towards this. 

There is a lot we could debate about this mission statement. But overall I think it could be much more simple.

1 to work with the partners to provide good quality housing and ensure that there are good health and education facilities and community space, adequate and suitable for the site demographics. And to facilitate employment, leisure and retail opportunities on site to the extent possible in the context of what is already available within the vicinity of the site. 

2 to hel[ create a physical environment that is pleasant for all residents, of all ages, abilities and backgrounds to live in and where they have the opportunity to develop the sort of community they as residents want to be part of. 

I think that if the housing and services are good most other things will take care of themselves but it just takes time.

After 8 years here in KSS3 I do believe that the residents are beginning to form a community here that I for one feel happy to be part of. How that moves into the greater community is more difficult to envisage. Maybe we start with individual KSS andPhase communities but I think at the end of the day it all comes down to living in a pleasant environment and that is what WDCO can help achieve.

Hilary Britton