This is the first monthly news update for what’s happening in the budding commons movement in Stroud and Liverpool, plus Mutual Credit Services and our partners and friends around the UK and the world. If you’d like to get involved in any of these groups, or set up a commons group in your town, or if you’re already part of a commoning group anywhere, and have news to share, let us know.
This first news update is a long one, as it includes background for each sector. Subsequent updates will be much shorter!
1. Stroud Housing Commons
We’re finalising the tenancy agreement for the first tenants in the first housing commons house.
Here’s an article about that house, and the process of finding tenants. There were 42 applications, which we narrowed down to three, who we interviewed and made our final choice. It really wasn’t easy, as all candidates were great. In fact, one of the unsuccessful applicants has since joined the housing commons group, to help get more properties.
We’re carrying out a few more checks, after which they should be moving in later in February. Our steward Chris has done a great job getting new carpets, windowns fixed, electrics checked, handrails internally and externally and some other maintenance jobs.
Stroud Housing Commons will be producing portfolios for investors, to bring in money to buy more properties, which we’ll blog about when we have them! But housing commons groups will remain small and human scale. Rather than continuing to grow, each housing commons group will generate more local groups, so that each neighbourhood can have its own housing commons.
We’ve documented our tenant selection process so that it can be incorporated into a toolkit / playbook for housing commons groups to use in setting up a housing commons in their town.
2. Stroud Climbing Commons
This will be the UK’s first climbing commons – there’s been a deal with an organisation in Stroud, and if all goes well, there should be a commons/community-owned climbing centre opening in the summer at Brimscombe Mill.
We did a survey last year and got over 600 responses, demonstrating massive enthusiasm for a climbing facility in Stroud. We’re registered with the Association of British Climbing Walls; we’ve developed an insurable, community run operating model; we’ve successfully crowdsourced around £17K to support the project, and we’ve been awarded £8000 from UnLtd through their Movement for Change programme supported by Sport England. We’ll announce a date for a community meeting once we have a draft agreement and a structural engineer to look at the viability.
The Climbing Commons will generate income from charging monthly/annual memberships alongside a day pass offer. Once operational, our forecasts indicate that we can offer a pricing model well below the prevailing rates for other climbing facilitites in the region without being a competition, because we’ll be bringing new climbers into the sport. We want to make climbing affordable and accessible to more people and we’re open to exploring ways of developing a ‘pay as you can’ offer.
Here’s an interview that explains more details of the project.
3. Stroud Land Commons
Last year we brought together around 20 organisations owning or looking to own land and community buildings in Stroud, to form what we called a ‘cauldron’ containing all these local groups, to see how we might work together and benefit each other. We met with group representatives to look at their capacities, networks, needs and challenges, and think about how the cauldron could move forward to support each other, using the commons model.
The big challenge with land acquisition using a commons model is that in order for investors to obtain a reasonable return, the growers and food producers who will be renting the land need to be generating a lot more income than currently – and that’s difficult because land and house prices are inflated, but food prices are deflated. Cheap supermarket food means that growers are squeezed – to the point that they have to leave the land or struggle to sustain a business / organisation / livelihood. Then locally-grown, organic food is only accessible for the well-off, who get healthy, better-quality food, but the less well-off don’t.
How do we make good food more affordable? There are several strands. First, there’s a need to reduce house prices. We could maybe provide tiny houses / caravans on growing land. Then lower income is still viable, as growers will just need to buy food and energy, with very low or no housing costs.
But the larger task is to increase demand for local food. We are working on several ways in which we could increase demand, joining the dots to increase efficiencies and developing strategies for a campaign that can benefit the cauldron members.
SLC member Nick Weir has been working on efficient local food systems for decades, with the Open Food Network (OFN) – which is like an online shop for small food producers. OFN’s Food Hub aggregates the produce from multiple growers and reduces their admin side so that they can focus on growing food. We are working on several strands that can bring in bigger orders for locally grown food over a longer term. We’ll interview Nick soon, to talk about recent developments with OFN.
We need a cultural shift – to see locally-grown produce as providing food resilience in communities during hard times, which is worth a lot. Food hub networks could bring in enormous demand, serving better-off and less well-off communities – then land commons becomes a much more viable investment vehicle.
We got to know local community hubs, who have some powerful ideas, including food events where people buy pre-paid vouchers. Locally-produced food becomes something that local people have agency over, which can help build a new food culture from the ground up
4. Stroud Energy Commons
Energy demand and use is directly linked to resource use, waste and carbon emissions. The evidence on this is very clear. So energy use needs to be reduced. We need to move towards renewables of course, but although renewables are increasing, they’re not replacing fossil fuels. Total energy use is growing, including a still-expanding (and heavily subsidised) fossil fuel sector.
There are barriers to reducing energy use: centralised grids, vested interests and market mechanisms prevent it. How do we overcome those barriers?
First let’s look at government-owned energy infrastructure. Management of local energy provision isn’t feasible at the national scale, and anyway, they can’t afford it. Water companies know this already, but it’s the same for energy. Future demand can’t be met with current infrastructure, but governments can’t design at the local level. Interventions consistent with reducing energy use and carbon emissions include things like reed beds, micro-hydro, small-scale renewables, heat pumps, waste water heat extraction, voltage optimisation at sub-stations and resilient and smart local grids. These kinds of interventions can only be managed, designed and implemented by local people. Corporations can’t do it either, because they demand economic growth, which can’t be decoupled from growth in energy use.
Denmark is the counter-argument to this position – they’ve decentralised their energy grid, and reduced carbon emissions while at the same time growing GDP. But – they’ve exported their manufacturing industry to the Global South (where there are fewer environmental regulations); they’re a net exporter of (North Sea) oil; and their consumption levels are way above the global average (one of the highest, in fact). So they’re able shift blame to the Global South, and argue that it’s all India and China’s fault. This is much the same in the UK. We’ve halved domestic emissions since 1990, but 37% of our consumption-related emissions have been exported to the Global South, and fossil fuel burning is still rising.
So we need community management, with energy generation close to energy use, to reduce transmission distances/losses. Co-ops could provide this, and they’re preferable to corporates, but they still have a profit motive, they have to incur debt with the banking sector to build infrastructure, and can be (and often are) bought out by the corporate sector.
Commons is the alternative to markets, governments and co-ops.
We carried out ethnographic research on attitudes towards energy projects in Stroud, in the summer of 2024. The intention is to build on these results to develop community energy systems / energy commons in Stroud. This has now culminated in a Europe-wide university consortium, developing demonstration projects in 4 countries. Stroud is the lead demo site for the UK, with a bid in for a multi-million project led by the University of Essex, structured around community financing of community energy infrastructure (energy commons will provide the management, community energy the infrastructure). The outcome we’re looking for is a transition to 100% community-owned renewable energy in Stroud, that can be replicated in other communities.
More on building an energy commons.
5. Stroud Water Commons
It’s very early days, but after an initial meeting of some concerned local people, a basic roadmap has been written up to build a Stroud Water Commons, working in partnership with Stroud Land Commons and/or local landowners to obtain land initially for natural sewage infrastructure owned by the community. This will be based on reed beds, for which we have local expertise via Water21.
We’ll be looking at piloting local models. The roadmap involves firstly generating questionnaires for local businesses, individuals and community organisations to help us drill down into their needs as regards water provision and sewage management, after which we’ll be negotiating with OFWAT, water companies, the local authority, EA, then building commons tools for community investment and ownership, followed by scoping of sites, consultations, design and implementation of natural systems.
We want to empower individuals and communities to manage their own sewage safely, whilst reducing bills and pollution. We’ll do this with ongoing communication with local people, water companies and local authorities, and we’ll be developing a range of educational materials to inform the public and interested bodies.
6. Stroud Care Commons
A small group interested in forming a care commons has started to meet monthly. We’re talking with the Equal Care Co-op – who have a model in Hebden Bridge that includes carers, recipients of care and their family members, all as full members – to see what might be viable in Stroud. We want to make sure that everything we do is safe and legal. Regulated care will probably be too much at first, as it involves a lot of work and complexity. We’ll be trying to meet with and learn from people involved in care in Stroud, to think more about what a care commons might look like.
We will be holding a public event in October or November in the Trinity Rooms. We want to bring together lots of people who are already working in care in the largest sense of the word, to celebrate, join the dots and see what barriers we can overcome together.
7. Stroud Festival of Commoning
This year’s Festival of Commoning in Stroud will be on September 12th and 13th, at the Trinity Rooms and Lansdown Hall. The Festival website will be going live very soon.
Last year’s festival was very successful. Here’s an article by an attendee.
We’re hoping to have a tasty line-up, including representatives of other commoning groups around the country, plus Matthew Slater, Sonia Bussu, Andy Goldring of the Permaculture Association, Indy Johar of Dark Matter Labs, Jem Bendell, Adam Greenfield, Marcus Saul of Island Power, Pam Warhurst of Incredible Edible, Jason Hickel and Roman Krznaric (these last two are unconfirmed, but fingers crossed).
There will be 2 full days of powerful stories, plus entertainment, a comedy evening, and food. Discounted early-bird tickets will be available soon. Sign up to our blog to be notified when the website comes online and tickets are available.
8. Local Loop Merseyside (LLM)
LLM are our partners in Merseyside, building a city-wide credit clearing network for businesses in Liverpool. They plan to ‘make Merseyside the most collaborative economy in the UK’, in a way that’s replicable in other cities.
They’re currently refining invoice upload and clearing tools to make participation as effortless and impactful as possible for businesses. When the tech is ready, they’ll transition to the full clearing club offering, then scale to include more businesses, creating more opportunities for collaboration. They’re developing tailored events, workshops and resources to help local businesses save money and thrive.
They’re partnering with the University of Liverpool, Liverpool Chamber of Commerce and various local business networks, and they’re getting closer to being investment-ready.
Small businesses in Merseyside can go to their website and sign up.
9. Mutual Credit Services (MCS)
MCS are partnering with commons groups in Stroud, Liverpool and elsewhere. They design and build commons models for all sectors of the economy. In autumn last year, they began a £460k project, 70% funded by Innovate UK to develop and launch LLM. They’re talking with lawyers in Liverpool, who are working on the legal structure for LLM, which could be a generic legal structure for commons organisations of all kinds. They’ve just interviewed for a technical programme manager, and received applications from high-quality people, used to working in large companies, who are excited by MCS/LLM because they really like the focus on local economies.
10. Commons Lab
We’re building an institution to act as a local social research lab, driven by need, rather than just ideas. The lab will look at commons governance and policies, developing scalable tools for ethnographic research, to work out what kinds of things communities need, how the commons can be framed, find any divisions in communities and how to build cohesion so that people can work together.
It will involve specialists in social research, identity and culture, economic modelling and governance, as well as community-based practitioners. It will become an ecosystem, with community involvement, developing things for Stroud – but as models become viable, we have the infrastructure to distribute them more widely. We’re currently developing an investor pitch to kickstart the process.
11. Other
Our friends at Bristol Commons are hosting a Festival of Commoning on March 22. Members of Stroud Commons are hoping to present.
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