A reflection on a day spent learning from our community partners: Muungano wa wanavijiji and Community Savers.
“It’s not just between the four walls…” said Nicera from Muungano wa Wanavijiji (SDI Kenya). She was talking about housing but really, she was talking about life. About community. About the invisible architecture that holds us together.
That line stayed with me throughout the workshop. Because she was right: it’s not the four walls that make a home. It’s the feeling that lives within them. The sense of pride, dignity, safety, and the knowledge that someone has your back.
We spent the day in conversation between two cities–Manchester and Nairobi—each facing very different landscapes, yet speaking in a remarkably similar language of resilience.
In Kenya, the pace of urbanisation has been staggering. Since the country’s independence, there has been an increase in housing shortages with the government estimating a need for 250,000 housing units, and only 50,000 exist. In Nairobi, over half the city’s residents (56%) live in informal settlements. These are statistics that make you pause and think: Who’s doing something about this?
Groups like SDI Kenya and Muungano wa Wanavijiji are not waiting for top-down solutions. They are reimagining social housing from the ground up. In Mukuru, community-led projects are designing vertical, vibrant homes; not uniform boxes, but buildings that carry colour, character, and community in every detail. You can almost picture it: families relocating from informal settlements into homes the local community helped design, built not just with concrete but with heart and compassion.
And then there was Community Savers in Manchester. Thousands of miles away, yet the stories somehow intertwined.
Sue and Anne, from Miles Platting Savers, told us about a presentation back in 2018 that depicted a watercolour map of Manchester but their home simply… wasn’t there. Their neighbourhood had been painted over. You could feel the silence in the room. Years later, that uncertainty still hangs over people’s heads, “some people are still living under that cloud”.
I could feel that heaviness. The weight of being erased. Bernard, from Hulme Aquarius Savers, called it being “a community of ghosts”. People still living in ageing high-rises, waiting for answers that never come, watching as decisions are made about their futures without them in the room. It’s as if their lives have been half-erased by bureaucracy, but they’re still very much there, fighting to be seen.
But these are not ghost stories. These are stories of persistence and of people who refuse to disappear quietly.
As Thirza from Moss Side put it with the cheeky northern humour that always uplifts a room: “All we’ve ever asked for is to be around the table. Invite us. We like a cup of tea and we love to talk.”
That line got a laugh, but it also said everything. This isn’t about grand gestures. It’s about inclusion, about being seen. It’s about councils and governments realising that communities aren’t obstacles to development; they are the development.
Because the truth is, these groups from Manchester’s CLASS network to Kenya’s SDI are already doing the work. They’re out there surveying their neighbourhoods, organising savings groups, drawing maps that put their communities back on the paper where they belong. They are proving that people are not just beneficiaries of change, they are its architects.
Listening to them, I realised that what connects Nairobi and Manchester isn’t just a shared housing crisis; it’s a shared hope. Both cities are full of people who have reasons to give up, and yet don’t. They show us what solidarity looks like when it’s lived, not only imagined.
By the end of the day, that hope felt contagious. The stories folded into each other, like bricks in the same wall. Each voice, whether it being Kenyan or Mancunian, was adding to the same foundation: one that said we belong here.
Because these communities won’t fade quietly. They will not become footnotes or data points. They are real, breathing, fighting for space in cities they love! Cities that, for all their flaws, they still call home.
Haydn Brown from Manchester City Council said something that struck me: “We’re limited if we just look at strategy.” And he’s right. Strategy can map the city, but it can’t animate it. Only people can do that. Real change doesn’t begin in a policy document; it begins in a living room, a residents’ meeting, a shared meal.
That’s what this workshop reminded me of: that housing isn’t just about shelter. It’s about belonging. It’s about people taking back authorship of their own stories, laying the foundation of their own home. Putting the heart of communities back into the centre of development.
And that’s where One World Together comes in. Our work supports these movements–CLASS in Manchester and Muungano wa wavajiji in Nairobi–by financially investing in their initiatives. It’s a partnership built on trust and solidarity and shared purpose. It’s about recognising that whether you’re rebuilding a block in Mukuru or joining the fight for affordable housing in Miles Platting, the struggle and strengths are shared.
We are, all of us, part of the same blueprint. One where community isn’t an afterthought, but the foundation itself.
So when I think back to Nicera’s words that, “it’s not just between the four walls”, I hear them as a reminder that the walls of a home don’t just hold up a roof. They hold up a world.
Written By Skyler Colarusso
It starts with you
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