Neighbourocracy Autumn 2022
28 people, including 6 young people, attended a gathering in Autumn 2022 with Nate Whitestone from A Fairer Society and Joseph Rathinam from the Neighborocracy Movement. Joseph is a South Indian community activist, the lead trainer for the Neighbourhood Parliaments movement, and an advocate and practitioner of ‘Neighborocracy’. More than 400,000 neighbourhood-based citizen groups have been established to help their national and local governments reach the UN Sustainable Development Goals by addressing issues such as climate change, human rights, health, poverty, and gender equality, among others.
The Neighbourhood Parliaments movement has been a way for people to overcome economic crises, environmental challenges, social issues, and political alienation in communities across the global South, and it has value for us here in the UK. Joseph has been brought to the UK by SONEC (Sociocratic Neighbourhood Circles), an Erasmus+ project that addresses serious social and environmental issues by applying neighbourhood-based, bottom-up, participatory, and inclusive decision-making processes. [SONEC Website](https://sonec.org)
We heard from Joseph Rathinam on how radical love and a conviction that every voice is needed within communities is making a difference in communities in South India. His vision is to establish a global network of neighbourhood parliaments – groups of 30 people who live near each other. Imagine the economic benefits of one wealthier group choosing to buy its staples directly from another group rather than a corporation! And although we are a long way off, the room was energised with the ability to dream.
Nate Whitestone, whose organisation, A Fairer Society, brought Joseph to the UK, spoke about the ways that sociocratic principles connected so well with the Neighbourhood Parliament movement. Sociocracy and the ability to organise into micro groups so that all voices can be heard is increasingly becoming more important at the community level. A telling statement from one of the young people’s youth workers was, “They know they aren’t listened to.” Surely, if we ever want to see genuine engagement and community wellbeing, we have to start here and repair the places where we have ignored the voices of those we are supposed to be supporting.
Matt Bell said Plymouth has already got solid foundations for transformational change, which increase as we work more closely together across sectors within the city. He said, “We can start to show that by working in ways that honour one another, listening and connecting, we can start levelling wealth, increasing cohesion, reducing healthcare costs, and giving birth to a new social economy... More and more evidence is revealing that instead of the accepted model of effective people providing help to ineffective people, we are all highly reliant upon those around us, the environment we live in, and the conditions we work together in.”