Building Belonging – some highlights

We're so proud of our recent Building Belonging podcast series in partnership with Onward. The 10 episodes spotlight the stories of some of the country's most inspiring civic institutions – organisations and initiatives that are creating connection and community from the bottom up, and which are now making change at the systemic level too – as well as the inspiring people who built them.

In its 10-week run, Building Belonging received over 10,000 hits and was referenced in various civil society newsletters and emails. It was also retweeted by then-Secretary for Levelling Up, Michael Gove. In that sense, the podcast is helping us to achieve the goal of helping power to understand community, and helping community to leverage its collective power in the ongoing debate about how we create a new social fabric fit for our times.

Building Belonging is packed with special, moving moments but as we reflect on the series we wanted to share some of the lessons that most inspired us at The Cares Family:

• "So that's where The Roots Programme really came from: how do we find a little bit more compassion for people who are different to us? How do we become more curious?" – Ruth Ibegbuna (Episode 8)
  
• "There's a real tension for those of us pursuing social justice that the urgent work can completely overwhelm the deep work that's needed. And it's very, very hard to create space for the deep work when there is so much urgent work to do. Our work at JRF is to create space for that deep work as well" – Sophia Parker (Episode 6)
  
• "There wasn't this idea that I was going to go and run an organisation. I had no intentions of doing it. But I looked at this issue and realised that there was a different and better way of doing it, and I realised that one of us was going to have to be the one to lead it" – Emmanuel Akpan-Inwang (Episode 5)
  
• "It's easier to be anonymous. We are moving to this increasingly individualistic world where the more isolating individualist choice is almost always the easier one and that's why we continue to opt in to lives that are more independent and away from choices that help to develop community" – Ivo Gormley (Episode 4)
  
• "There are enough of us in parliament and outside parliament who are going to keep loneliness on the agenda. There are enough organisations out there doing this in the real world. And what they've got to do is push us as parliamentarians to keep it on the agenda. We can then push the government to keep it on the agenda. We do need a specific strategy, but it can also be threaded into other areas policy. So it's about us working together" – Kim Leadbeater (Episode 3)