Over the past weeks and months, individuals from over 20 frontline organisations – working directly with people struggling to get by due to the cost of living – answered the call out and developed a plan for the new Cost of Living Alliance together.
Background
The Cost of Living Alliance (convened by Community Organisers) was “a grassroots movement representing over 100 local, regional and national organisations that [were] committed to championing community-led solutions to the cost of living crisis” created in 2022.
The four actions the campaign promoted were to
i) collect and share stories about the impact of the crisis
ii) use social media to challenge price increases
iii) declare a Cost of Living Emergency in your area and
iv) host a ‘Cost of Living Summit’.
The Alliance was successful in galvanizing activity: many councils declared cost of living emergencies and a host of Summits were organised (mostly by councils) across the country. Despite this, Community Organisers wound down the Alliance and invited members to join another project – Humanity Project – which is about training and supporting organisations to organise deliberative community assemblies (partly due to the popularity of the Summit model). This was also because the ‘cost of living’ lost some of its salience as an issue when the Government brought in some modest support measures.
Community Organisers will once again act as the convenor for this alliance and have started to explore funding options (if you know of any promising funding opportunities, please email lachlan.ayles@corganisers.org.uk).
The new problem statement, vision, goals, activities, and organisation design will be published on the new CoLA website soon and updated here as soon as the site goes live.
