Building a new form of community power beyond the state 

Throughout 2026, the We’re Right Here campaign is inviting the wider community power sector to share their perspectives on where our movement should focus its energy. From a supporter survey to workshops and one-on-one conversations, we’re crowdsourcing ideas, views and diverse experiences as we step into a new phase of our campaign. This blog is based on a thought-provoking speech that Rashid Iqbal, CEO of Camden-based charity the Winch, delivered at one of our workshops.

When I hear people talk about community power, I often wonder whether they are starting in the wrong place. 

The question often asked is: what kind of relationship should the state have with communities? 

But for someone with my experiences, that question carries many assumptions. It assumes the state is always neutral, objective and benevolent. Even when so much of my work is about undoing or avoiding state harm. 

And it ignores the moment we are living in: a moment where corporate and state power are increasingly fused; where authoritarianism is no longer something that happens elsewhere, but something metastasising throughout our institutions; and where we bear witness to the ‘elite capture’ of the tools of our civic liberation. 

So, I want to ask a better question: What kind of relationship do communities want and deserve to have with the state? 

If we are moving toward a future shaped by climate instability and economic volatility – the permacrisis – then governments will feel pressure to act more authoritatively. 

What should we be building today in anticipation of that strain? Communities that can adapt, self-organise and sustain essential services – or, to borrow the language of Dark Matter Labs, communities that are ‘anti-fragile’? 

Perhaps this is what the power of community should really mean. 

And if so, then we need to think differently about how we incubate community-led governance and cultivate the practices that allow power to grow at neighbourhood level. 

Neighbourhood washing 

When we treat the current system as fundamentally sound, only in need of reform, then we accept the boundaries set by those who already hold power and their allies. 

And in doing so, we risk participating in something deeply problematic: neighbourhood washing. 

The neighbourhood is often the most impactful scale at which we can operate. It is where life actually happens – and where government dysfunction is most keenly felt. 

This is often where the state simulates intimacy rather than stimulates trust, using the aesthetics of participation to imitate authenticity and the language of inclusion to disguise new forms of patronage. 

Governments speak comfortably about “place-making” without ever reckoning with their historic role in the unmaking of place. 

At the same time, organisations are often told they are only credible when they scale, but are most legitimate when they remain “grassroots”. Yet in today’s funding environment, “grassroots” has increasingly become a category through which organisations are expected to accept precarity in exchange for a symbolic legitimacy. 

In other words, we valorise the ‘suits’ and orientalise the grassroots. The result is a field in which solidarity remains fragmented and old hierarchies of worthiness resurface. 

Meanwhile, in the face of the permacrisis, what we actually need to do is seed the fields that will enable us to endure, in solidarity with each other. 

Building community power 

If we are serious about building community power, then we need to do something different. 

First, we must affirm everyday diversity. 

Communities are not neat or unified entities. They are complex, dynamic and diverse. Any meaningful approach to power must begin here – not by smoothing over differences, but by building new frameworks for collective functioning and flourishing. 

In an age of growing authoritarianism, one of the central functions of building power must be pushing back against the scapegoating and stigmatisation of minority communities. 

Second, we must practise everyday deliberative democracy. 

We need to reclaim politics from the tyranny of vox pops and party politics. Democracy cannot simply mean deciding who gets power once every five years and then outsourcing its exercise to others. 

Power must be continuously tested and reshaped in people, in assets, in rights and capabilities at the level of neighbourhoods. 

This is partly why, at the Winch, we are running a Neighbourhood Citizens’ Assembly on climate change and developing new deliberative spaces for young people and children of colour. 

These are not simply programmes. They are attempts to rediscover ways of being with one another: testing truths, navigating difference and creating the conditions for people to shape shared futures and build trust together. 

And if trust is not lived, it will be lost.

Third, we must build collective efficacy. 

Not simply individual leadership, but the shared belief and shared capacity that together, we can act. 

We can’t just elevate individual heroes, we need to resource and build movements, and we need to rediscover fields of practice that bridge and span different domains. Because the challenges we face do not sit obediently in one domain, and so neither can the solutions. 

This work is not easy. It is slow and messy and unforgiving. There are no guarantees of success. But the alternative is far worse. 

Communities are ready to step into their power. Many were ready yesterday. 

What is needed now is the willingness to stand alongside them and resource them differently. Not as participation fodder or fetishes of lived experience, but as the first and best firewall against fascism. 

We can be the builders, dreamers and creators of something more resilient and more just. 

A new form of community power.