Can we tackle the cost-of-living crisis in our communities?

This week we launched Building resilience: Community responses to the cost-of-living crisis, an evaluation report conducted by People and Work, exploring how Invest Local groups have stepped up to tackle the cost-of-living crisis in their communities.

Invest Local is a long-term funding programme operating in 13 Welsh areas, which gives residents the power to decide how to make their communities stronger places.

These communities already face challenges with insecurity and low incomes, but these pressures intensified during and since COVID-19 and especially since the surge in fuel prices following the invasion of Ukraine. In line with many other community initiatives, most Invest Local areas shifted the focus of much of their work towards helping people manage the daily realities of poverty, alongside other work to develop local assets and build community cohesion.

The evaluation highlights three main strands of focus for Invest Local groups:

· Helping people save where they can: through affordable food and goods provision (community pantries and shops) fuel vouchers, and low-cost leisure activities.

· Improving access to advice and support: connecting people locally with advice on welfare benefits, housing, energy and, occasionally, direct financial support through small emergency grants.

· Helping people to cope with dignity: by reducing stigma, creating welcoming social spaces, and supporting people’s mental health and wellbeing.

All three strands share a key ingredient: they happen locally. This means people can get help without needing to travel or navigate endless systems.

Although the political discourse around the “cost-of-living crisis” has receded somewhat, for many people the crisis remains very real as inflationary costs on essentials are hitting those on lowest incomes the hardest. Prices remain high, wages are stagnant, and essentials including food and heating continue to bite the hardest for those on the lowest incomes.

Community groups have proven to be a lifeline in helping people mitigate the impacts of the crisis. Where they are active, they are almost always accessible, offering a human touch and ensuring that people receive support without judgement or red tape.

Community organisations are meeting more than just obvious need – once they know a person or a family, they can help ensure they are aware of wider, joined-up support. Helping them to access a fuel voucher at the same time as offering cheap activities for young people, or a mutual support group for young parents or a Men’s Shed for older, socially isolated men. They connect people and while a meal might fill a stomach – it also feeds a person’s social life, sense of belonging and dignity.

There are also limits to what community groups can do; one of their strengths is that they don’t categorise who should be receiving support and who shouldn’t, but this in turn reduces their ability to target support at people who need it most. And of course, community organisations don’t, except in very exceptional circumstances offer cash, which is the single best way of addressing poverty.

Most critically the coverage of community organisations isn’t evenly spread: some areas have active and inclusive organisations in place, others simply don’t – often because they lack space and infrastructure. This is not the case with Invest Local; not purely because Building Communities Trust (BCT) provided flexible funding, but because local people showed the enterprise to develop organisations and the spaces to run them. In our experience local urban design has played a critical, often under recognised role, in creating an environment in which people can or cannot develop support structures for themselves.

Despite these limitations, one thing is clear: community responses to the cost-of-living crisis and extreme income insecurity are here to stay. Foodbanks, community pantries and warm hubs are no longer stopgaps or a temporary fix, but a fixture of daily life.

Even within the welfare state, those working within the system refer vulnerable people to the support offered by community organisations, recognising that they often provide what statutory services cannot.

However, the bitter irony in this collaboration to support people in real need is that while community organisations work tirelessly to help others, many are struggling to survive themselves. Rising costs, shrinking grants and a lack of resources, including recruiting and retaining volunteers, are real threats to their being able to continue running.

The cost-of-living crisis and the accompanying squeeze on funding means that the people holding our communities together are stretched to breaking point. If they cannot continue their work, then what happens to those that they support? While we might applaud their resilience, the bottom line is that we need to start funding their survival.