What should a city do? Community-led change in Belfast and beyond
25 October 2024
14 minute read
Born, brought up and based here, I know often Northern Ireland feels on the periphery; on the edge of the UK, of Ireland, of Europe. If anyone knows anything about this place, it is likely to include conflict.
A year ago, Transition Together formally extended to cover Northern Ireland, offering our training, events and support to aligned groups here. Five groups received seed funding and when Rich, who runs the programme, was keen to visit, I jumped at the chance to take him below the surface and behind the headlines, and show him another side of Northern Ireland’s story.
Footprints
Fresh off the overnight boat (after the obligatory Ulster Fry), our first stop was Footprints Women’s Centre, on the outskirts of West Belfast and one of the longest-standing Transition groups here. It’s a cornerstone of this community with a mission “to eradicate inequities that impact on the lives of women and children.”
90% of the area is social housing. The trauma of the local conflict and for newcomers escaping war are acute and support for social issues, including domestic abuse, is woefully under-resourced. Covid death rates were triple the national average. Poverty is a reality, and the cost of living crisis has pushed more working families into precarity.
Eileen Wilson, the Centre’s Sustainable Living Manager, showed us around and shared how at Footprints, meeting these pressing needs is intricately linked to resilience in the face of the changing climate: “In the early days of Transition, we were showing films, bringing in speakers about permaculture and more. It was a time of great excitement, people felt they could really do something.”
She shared how this vision has helped the project itself be more resilient and better able to serve their community. The solar panels on the roof protect against energy shocks. They turned an unused office into a repair and reuse room to help local families share more and buy less. The permaculture garden supplies their social supermarket, the first in Northern Ireland after Eileen read about a London experiment in the Feeding Britain report.
A new Slow Food Lunch Club was supported by Transition Together seed funding. Each Friday, women gather to cook and eat together, sharing food from the garden and participants’ traditional food cultures. In the holidays, children joined in and families took home growing boxes. Eileen said: “It’s cooking a good healthy meal, but it’s so much more than that. It’s sitting down and having a good chat and supporting each other.”
The blending of ‘head, heart and hands’ is so clear in Footprints approach and success – always adapting, responding and listening to the local woman who make up the organisation’s board and community.
Grow
We whisk across town just in time to catch the excited chatter (in Irish) of kids who’d escaped the classroom for the morning to make seed bombs and toast marshmallows at one of Grow’s community gardens.
Volunteer Cony Ortiz meets us and showed us the veg beds and polytunnel with grapes, tomatoes and chillies still ripening, hand-painted signs in Arabic and English. There are spaces for quiet, for nature and for community, including a pizza oven built from the clay soil on which Belfast’s stands. She highlighted the potato variety from her native Columbia and told us about the weekly women’s group, with women who’ve made their homes in Belfast after fleeing war. “We plant seeds, we talk, we eat together,” says Cony. “I’ve been here 39 years – and this feels like home.”
Grow has five sites across Belfast and joined Transition Network in 2023. This garden on the edge of the Waterworks public park, “was a bit of wasteground, a bit of a buffer between different communities,” says gardener Craig Sands. It’s nestled between a series of fences, high enough to stop stones or worse being thrown over.
They are growing at the margins and with those who society has marginalised. Pauline O’Flynn explained how growing food and bringing people together naturally led the project to become involved with issues of land justice and access to housing in Belfast. Like an ecosystem – food and land are interwoven with inequality, division, justice and trauma (connections Pauline spoke about at Transition Alive). And in this city, people’s everyday struggles and fortunes are connected, no matter how many ‘peace walls’ or politicians divide. As a small grassroot group dealing with this complexity, it can be a struggle to raise funds, and Grow has launched a crowdfunder inviting solidarity from those interested in unravelling these interwoven challenges.
After a spontaneous invitation to join staff and volunteers for shared lunch of Singaporean rice, halal chicken, samosas and spicy scrambled eggs, Rich discovered he had met Cony’s family members in Bogotá in a previous life as a theatre producer – further confirmation of our inter-connectedness!
Carrick Greengrocers
Next we travel 8 miles north of Belfast to see a ground-breaking initiative, emerging from the community and a conversation to re-imagine the historic town of Carrickfergus: what could the town be like? What would make it thrive?
With a dwindling high street and boarded up shops, many spoke of more local businesses; there hadn’t been a greengrocers for 20 years in this town of 28,000. In 2023, a new co-operative raised £34,000 in community shares mostly from local residents and opened the first co-op greengrocers in Northern Ireland in one of those vacant shop units.
We meet shop manager, Ian, who enthusiastically introduced us to each product and its maker or grower like old friends. They stock local sourdough, coffee roasted by veterans in the town, and honey, jam, chutneys, juices and vegan cheese. Thanks to funding from Sustain’s Bridging the Gap project, their Friendly Food Club halves the price of veg for families on low incomes.
Ian says it’s challenging to change people’s shopping habits, and to compete on convenience with supermarkets. Where the greengrocers is unrivalled, though, is on quality, local produce and support for an ecosystem of local producers.
This was not a group of retail or vegetable experts – but local people who saw a need and an opportunity to do things differently. It has not been plain sailing, but the shop defied expectations, taking £10,000 in its first week and showing people were not only interested in cheap, convenient food.
Rainbow Alley
Setting up a community business is a big step, and not for everyone. Yet even small projects can change a community. We saw this when we visited Rainbow Alley, a typical concrete strip separating two rows of small terraced homes in East Belfast. Typical, that is, until the neighbours came together during Covid, and created a little oasis of greenery.
It has become a space of encounter, where residents who’ve been in the street for generations meet newcomers, for children to play and a backdrop for community meals and shared celebrations. All this with little funding or structure, a donation of compost here, some seeds or plants there, and neighbours turning up pots, drawers, filing cabinets – anything they can plant in.
For these houses with virtually no garden and almost a mile to the nearest public park, it is transformative and only one of many alleyway gardens in Belfast’s traditional red-brick terraced streets. 9ft In Common is a project to explore the potential of the city’s 202km of alleyways, for creativity, connection, community and as green corridors. They plan to launch a manifesto for the city’s alleyways later this year.
Play, Think, Brink!
Heading to the heart of the city, we find a derelict site, overlooked by a colourful mural asking “What can/should/could this city do?”.
We’ve arrived at Brink! just as a brainstorming meeting breaks up, working out the next phase of the project. “We’re asking how we face into precarity,” said Gemma Reid. Not just the uncertainty of their meantime space – the site is earmarked for a multi-million pound visitors’ centre Belfast stories – but the precarity of funding, of the climate crisis, of economic uncertainty.
Everything at Brink! has been built to be moved. The native trees, herbs and food crops are planted in baths and barrels from the former Dunville Belfast distillery. Shipping containers with awnings form the shelter.
It’s not fundamentally a growing project, but a site to invite people to encounter fundamental questions about our past, the fragile present and the future we want to build. Creative producer Gawain Morrison, and Paul Kelly, a designer, are mindful to strip away the eco-jargon and academic language that can exclude people. Instead they ask how we eat, live, travel, waste, wear and power.
They’ve thrown open the space for workshops, festivals, markets, talks, movie nights, and for passers by to wander in. They have plans to hold Citizen’s Assemblies in different parts of the city. Transition seed funding has supported these events.
The project aims to bring together activists, artists, academics (it’s a partner of Queen’s University Belfast’s new Climate Co-Centre), and everyday people. Gemma adds these collaborations have brought together a really interesting mix of skills and themes, and led them to ask “What resources do we have? What can we get on with?”
Ben Vista CSA
Again, we leave the city behind and drive east into the low autumn sun, towards Newtownards to meet Barry Ferguson. He started a Community Supported Agriculture project this year, drawing together 30 families to share food produced on land his family has farmed since the 1860s. While there are 250 CSAs across the UK, this is one of only a handful in Northern Ireland.
When we arrive, Barry is getting ahead of the weekly harvest. “It is really good value,” he tells us. “In the large box, you get a dozen eggs and this week, it’s 14 kinds of vegetables. For most people, though, it’s not for the value, it’s because of the community.”
Barry says members come from all walks of life: “a computer gamer, a builder, a doctor,” all novice growers, yet many want to get hands on in the fields, help behind the scenes and in forging relationships with the land, the fruits of it and each other. One family acquired a portable pizza oven as a way to bring people together, and brought it to the CSA’s recent members’ day. It speaks to an appetite for a new relationship with food and the people who grow it.
Barry tells us much farming in Northern Ireland is large scale and intensive, with very little market gardening. Barry coordinates an emerging Landworkers Association chapter in Northern Ireland, bringing alternative voices and experience of regenerative food and farming to the debate, from those with their feet on the soil.
Ben Vista is also part of Bridging the Gap, offering half price veg boxes to families on the nearby estate. These new models are needed, but it’s challenging to make them work within current systems, and to create viable livelihoods which allow them to be sustained. Barry’s vision is a cooperative farm, owned by the community, with a third left for nature, feeding 200 local families from this site, just seven miles as the crow flies from Belfast City Hall. Like his crops, though, he wants to work with nature and let the project grow organically and from the ground up.
Larder>East
It’s getting towards teatime, and maybe it’s all this veg, but thoughts turn to food. We head to inner East Belfast, in the shadow of the city’s famous shipyard cranes Samson and Goliath, to the Larder>East.
Over a bowl of lentil dhal, rice, sausages and flatbread made by a volunteer chef (it turns out to be Joanne Boal of Rainbow Alley) Larder founder Louise Ferguson explained how it began in 2013 as a traditional foodbank response for families struggling to afford food. Over time, they realised this approach wasn’t tackling the root causes of food poverty, but it was separating people into different food systems, never mingling, as some were priced out of the grocery aisles and became reliant on donated and short-dated food over which they had no choice.
What emerged was a community-supported shop, using social pricing “to ensure all in East Belfast have a seat at the table and a cupboard full of good food.”
Everyone waits in the same queue and is invited for a cuppa, a traybake or a bite of dinner around communal tables, while they wait. Samson members get a weekly shop for £5. Goliath membership is a solidarity option for locals not in food poverty, who “care about food ethics but also food justice” – they can shop from the Larder’s refill staples, bread and organic eggs.
Working with Grow, they’ve also squeezed raised beds, a polytunnel and fruit trees, trained along the iron railings, around three sides of the building. It’s been supported by a Transition Together seed funding grant and gardener Michelle showed us the fruit and veg, which make their way into the food shop, the medicinal plants for home remedies and workshops, and flowers, which decorate the tables and make gifts for Larder members welcoming new babies or recovering from illness.
The Larder’s vision is “of economic reconciliation and a re-commoning of food that has for too long been treated as a commodity.” The atmosphere is vibrant – often there’s live music, everyone is introduced by name. From the chats and vibes, it’s obviously a balm to folks facing many challenges. We leave with their motto ringing in our ears: “There’s always enough when we share.”
In truth, we only scratched the surface. Time and availability did not allow us to make it to Holywood community farm on the shores of Belfast Lough, or the community-owned mill in a small rural village of 1,300 in Cloughmills, home to Northern Ireland’s first library of things, community fridge and one of its oldest Transition towns. There’s Open Ormeau, preparing to unleash a visioning conversation about their part of Belfast, and Community Together, fresh from the success of their first Diversity Carnival down a main route more accustomed to Orange marches.
Rich’s abiding impression was of this sense of journey for each project. A sensitivity to our past, but no desire to be bound by it. An eagerness to ask new questions and bring fresh thinking to how things are done. There was also a palpable energy to be involved in shaping the future, not to leave it to the powers that be.
As community initiatives flourish and give us glimpses of what that future could be like, with the scale of Northern Ireland, and the many inter-connections and relationships, you can’t help but think grassroots-led change has the potential to cascade here fast, despite the challenges. And that’s exciting.
We’re delighted to be hosting The Future’s Already Here – Communities stepping into their Power on 15 November 2024. A one day event organised by Transition Together, Co-operative Alternatives and Positive Carrickfergus to connect, support and highlight some of these change-making, heart-filling projects. If you are based in Northern Ireland do find out more and register here.
Find out more
Explore more about community action in Northern Ireland at The Future’s Already Here event