One of our first face to face events for some time brought together a range of Locality members and friends for a ‘Power of Community’ event offering a combination of advice & best practice, motivation, information and connection with others.
The event gave the opportunity to review the Spotlight Programme and get colleagues views on how our London focussed activities should be shaped over the next few years.
The cost of living crisis, the rise of the mutual aid movement and debates about ‘levelling up’ were of course a key backdrop. In London there are 16% of families experiencing low food security according to the Data London Survey of Londoners. We see a heightened crisis around regeneration and housing with 166,000 people and one child in every classroom homeless according to London Councils.
London’s community organisations form part of the solution, as we have been highlighting in the London Spotlight programme. So, what are organisations telling us is needed to support them:
- Funding – brokerage and influencing funders to provide flexible, long term and core funding.
- Assets – still a need for community hubs but also looking at physical assets differently.
- Procurement
– standing up against contracts that don’t have inflationary increases,
supporting local partnerships between the public and third sector local
providers.
- Collaboration – raising the game including with councils, building partnership to embed good work.
- Social impact – more support on articulating
Attendees also wanted to see more attention on ‘marginalised’ communities. We continue to expand our work as an infrastructure organisation with partners to increase representation in the community sector, challenge long-standing inequities and embed justice. Recent activities centred on racial justice have included:
- Research into the barriers faced by minoritised communities in securing community spaces
- Direct support to racialised groups though open days at our offices in Old Street and Spotlight Surgeries
- Networking for example Leaders of colour group

Through our London Spotlight programme and through our wider Locality offer we are able to support community organisations in a variety of ways. For example:
- Bid writing guidance and support helped a church based group in Barnet to secure a £10k grant for purchasing culturally appropriate, healthy food for its food share and advice scheme
- Through our paid consultancy offer, we supported a community hub organisation in a large regeneration scheme in East London to create a business plan and strategy as they moved to a new site.
- Locality facilitated a knowledge and skills exchange between a community hub in Haringey and a similar organisation in Bristol as both underwent major redevelopment programmes and navigated significant changes in their senior management teams and challenges with design, planning and significantly reduced funding opportunities
- Our consultancy work has also allowed us to support legacy planning for organisations in two Mayor of London Creative Enterprise Zones in Hackney and in Tottenham.