Lynne (left) and Annie (right) from our partners Community Savers and and Melanie (centre) from their support organisation, CLASS, reflect on what they saw, shared and learnt at our Community Building Summit in Nairobi — and on how learning alongside communities thousands of miles away helped them see their own communities, their strengths and the foundations of collective action differently.
Four people carrying a huge concrete slab was one of the images that stayed with us after visiting Nairobi. It was part of a community drainage project. There was no sophisticated machinery; people had identified something their neighbourhood needed and were working together to make it happen.
Later, when we sat down to talk about the trip, the same thought came up again and again: “They achieve so much with the little that they’ve got.” Then came the uncomfortable comparison: “We’ve got more resources than they have, but they seem to achieve things better than us.”
It would be easy to turn that into a story about the ingenuity of communities experiencing poverty. But that isn’t quite what we came home thinking. Nobody should have to accomplish extraordinary things with inadequate resources. The hardship and inequalities faced by communities we visited in Nairobi are real and shouldn’t be romanticised. In fact, seeing what community-led organisations were achieving made us think they should have more money, not less.
But it also made us curious about something harder to see. What sits underneath all that action? Why, when something needs doing, can people come together and make it happen? And why, even in communities that are better resourced in material terms, can bringing people together sometimes feel so difficult?
“What are you doing? Why are you doing it?”
We know there are strong communities in our own neighbourhoods of Hulme in Manchester and Arbourthorne in Sheffield, and we know people care deeply about them. But we also know how hard community organising can be. Sometimes you knock on doors and get nowhere. Sometimes, if something isn’t going to benefit someone directly, it can be difficult to persuade them to get involved. And sometimes the response to trying to organise something for the wider community is suspicion: “What are you doing? Why are you doing it?”
At one point in our conversation, someone simply said: “We need to gain more trust.”
That felt like one of the biggest lessons of the whole visit. So much of what impressed us in Nairobi seemed to have something less visible underneath it. People knew one another and who they could ask. They had groups they belonged to, places they could go and people around them with different roles and skills. When something happened, there were relationships and networks that could respond. None of those things necessarily looks dramatic on its own, but together they make collective action possible.
It looks like a savings group. But it is much more than that.
Perhaps that’s why we kept coming back to savings. Community savings were a strong part of the organising we saw in Nairobi, with different savings pots, loans and collectively managed funds that could help people through difficult moments or contribute towards things their communities needed. We loved their hard-backed savings books too — a visible sign that this was something people belonged to and took pride in.
It gave us practical ideas for our own savings groups, but also made us look again at what Community Savers is already doing. Lynne remembers seeing people coming to the savings table with their red books before she joined. She didn’t really know what they were doing at first. Then she found out it was a savings club and thought: “I wanted to be part of what everybody was a part of.”
That says a lot about what a savings group can become. At Community Savers, people might put away £1, £2, £3 or whatever they can afford, providing an important buffer when something unexpected happens. But the savings table is also somewhere people know they can go. If you’ve got no electricity, need emergency food support or something has gone wrong, you can quietly tell someone without having to announce your difficulties to a room full of people.
The savings matter, but around them sit relationships, dignity, practical support and belonging. The regularity matters too: the same people, in the same place, week after week. When we talked about what might help those relationships grow elsewhere, one answer was wonderfully uncomplicated: “Tea, cake and a chat. That’s all we need.”
Perhaps trust sometimes begins exactly like that: with ordinary spaces where people have a reason to come together, get to know one another and keep coming back. Over time, those encounters can become something much bigger — the knowledge that you belong here, and that if you need somebody, somebody will probably be there.
Making the “great big puzzle”
At Muungano wa Wanavijiji’s new Resilience Hub, people seemed to keep appearing. Someone would explain their role, then someone else would come in. There were young people, community organisers and different groups, all connected in different ways.
One resident described the picture she had in her head afterwards as “one great big puzzle.” If something in the middle needed attention, all those different pieces could come together around it: someone could do this; someone else knew how to do that; another group could bring something else.
It wasn’t one heroic organisation or individual doing everything. It was a network, with relationships already there to draw upon when something needed to happen. That made us reflect on our own communities too. Community Savers is itself part of a network of residents, neighbourhood groups and organisations, with CLASS supporting people to organise and connect across places. Perhaps the challenge isn’t always to create something new, but to strengthen those connections and help the different pieces become part of that bigger puzzle.
This kind of community infrastructure can be difficult to see, let alone measure. It doesn’t always appear in a project plan and nobody puts a financial value next to knowing who will turn up. But when something needs to happen or change, suddenly it matters enormously.
One World Together Community-Building Summit guests visit Muungano wa Wanavijiji’s Kiamaiko Community Resilience Hub in Nairobi, Kenya. More than a community resource, it also exemplifies what the community can achieve when they come together to plan, design and dream together.
Young people need more than something to do
We saw this especially clearly with young people. Those we met in Nairobi weren’t simply attending activities. They knew their communities and the issues around them, were proud of what they had helped achieve and had roles, responsibilities and networks around them.
That made us think about young people at home. We talked about one teenager in Sheffield who has lived locally for only a couple of years but already seems to know everything happening in his neighbourhood. Yet, like many teenagers locally, there is very little for him to become part of once school finishes.
So perhaps the question isn’t simply how do we get young people involved? It is also: what are we giving them to belong to? What roles are we trusting them with, and what relationships and networks are we building around them? What struck us in Nairobi wasn’t just young people’s enthusiasm. It was that they seemed to have a place within the wider community around them.
So perhaps the question isn’t simply how do we get young people involved? It is also: what are we giving them to belong to? What roles are we trusting them with, and what relationships and networks are we building around them? What struck us in Nairobi wasn’t just young people’s enthusiasm. It was that they seemed to have a place within the wider community.
And we are really excited now about our new youth mobilisation partnership with the Advocacy Academy which has just started. It will recruit 20 young people from Sheffield and Manchester for a programme of community organising, training and capacity building so that they can organise around the issues that matter to them in our neighbourhoods.
And then there is the money
There is a danger in talking about strong communities, relationships and trust that we accidentally make money sound unimportant. Our visit left us thinking almost exactly the opposite.
We met people capable of doing remarkable things with the resources available to them. Our reaction wasn’t: see, they don’t need much. It was: if they can do this much with what they have, imagine what they could do with more.
Talking afterwards about the One World Together partners we had spent time with — including Seed of Hope, Play it Forward, SDI Kenya and Muungano — we realised that it was really quite simple: “What they do with the money that they’ve got is a lot.”
That money matters. Trust cannot build a drainage system without materials. Relationships don’t pay staff. Strong communities should not be rewarded for their resourcefulness by being expected to keep stretching inadequate resources further and further.
What we saw instead was what can happen when resources reach communities where knowledge, relationships, commitment and networks already exist. Money can travel through all of that with such power. It doesn’t create the knowledge, relationships, commitment or networks that make change possible; it amplifies what is already there, giving communities the freedom and capacity to turn every pound that comes in into so much more.
For us, seeing what these organisations were achieving wasn’t evidence that they could manage with less. It was evidence that they deserved more.
One World Together Summit guests visiting Seed of Hope vocational training centre in Nairobi.
We came back with a mirror, not a blueprint
The trip changed some of us personally too. It made Annie look around her house and think: “I don’t need half the stuff I’ve got.” It made us all appreciate our families and what we have differently.
That wasn’t because hardship suddenly looked appealing. It was about perspective: recognising the resources we have around us and thinking differently about what really matters and what we do with what we have. It reminded us of something Seed of Hope’s Inge said after our visit to Kiamoko, where she saw depths of poverty in her own city that she’d never seen before: “It makes me ask myself, what more can I do?”
Perhaps the bigger shift, though, was in how we thought about our own community work. We haven’t come back thinking Manchester and Sheffield should become Nairobi, or with somebody else’s model to copy. Our histories, resources and challenges are different.
What we brought home were questions. How do we build trust and create places people want to belong to? How do we strengthen the networks around people and give young people meaningful roles? How do we value the relationships beneath visible community change — while making sure communities already achieving extraordinary things aren’t continually expected to do more with less?
At the end of our conversation, Melanie described how people in Nairobi had known leaders from Manchester and Sheffield, how naturally the connections seemed to stretch across places, and how warmly everyone had been welcomed.
“I felt like we were part of something bigger,” she said. “I felt like part of a movement.”
That feels like a fitting way to think about the exchange. It wasn’t about visitors looking in, or one community having the answers for another. It was about communities in very different places seeing something of themselves in each other, sharing what they know, and returning home able to see their own strengths and challenges differently.
Perhaps that’s what exchange at its best can do. It doesn’t give you somebody else’s answers. It helps you see your own questions differently.
Want to be part of this? Your donation to the Solidarity Fund provides flexible funding that community-led organisations can use where it matters most. And One World Together is about more than moving money: we create opportunities for our partners to come together, share what they know and learn from one another — like this Community Building Summit, made possible with support from the University of Manchester.
Join One World Together and help build a different way of supporting community-led change.
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