We offer you a warm Wigan welcome.
Welcome to the online home of Northern Heart and Soul CIC
We offer you a warm Wigan welcome
It’s difficult to offer someone a warm welcome online. You’ll need to imagine being warmly welcomed – a smile, a hand shake, a hug, maybe a brew and a biscuit.
If you’ve taken the time to visit us visit us then maybe you are curious about the journey we are on – dreaming into becoming a self-organising and renovating community that centres the feminine spirit, children and young people. Trusting that we can walk together towards a commoning future where racial, economic and climate justice can be realised.
Northern Heart and Soul formed as a CiC in August 2021 after spending a couple of years cultivating community as co-founders of Springfield, Beech Hill and Gidlow CommUnity, a mutual aid group, covering the ward of Wigan West. It’s during those dark and unjust times that the possibility of a more connected and just future revealed itself. So, we decided to make this the work, rather than ‘go back to work’. And thanks to investment from Lankelly Chase Foundation, we’ve been able to step into the journey at a very hyper local level. You could say our feet are firmly on the ground.
We’ve created this website as a living record. To share the joy we create, the new mistakes we make and the insights we glean. In doing so, we imagine, that we’ll discover more and more companions from across the globe. After all, as Rumi eloquently articulates, ‘We’re all just walking each other home’.
Journal of the Journey
Behind the scenes work that relates to the theory of change. To hold the looking glass as we walk.
Healing- A Function of Community?
It was probably 18 months ago when Danny McGowan approached me to contribute an article to ‘Class in Context’. Healing – A Function of a Connected Community was produced in April 202
Victims of Our Own Success
Sunday 21st April 2024 Currently I’m in the lakes, resting up and attempting to switch off from work. I’m literally exhausted and wondering how I might carry on. Noticing too that the exhausted fe
Meet Sammie
You may have read one of our recent journal entries ‘Women of Wigan’. That came about as we decided to put some questions to local women during our International Womens Day Celebrations. W
From Needy to Needed
As we begin to see how we grow our own version of the People Focus Group warden scheme in the community, thanks to some financial support from Wigan Council, (we think we’ll call ours community conn
Women of Wigan
This international womens day in our little part of the borough, it felt like the ground work that we’ve been busy with over the last few years is starting to blossom, and beginning to bear frui
Who Do You Think You Are?
I spend a lot of time listening to grassroots groups, along with really small and beautifully formed locally rooted enterprises and businesses. As they begin to grow and spread their wings, time and t