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.
James and the lemon drizzle cake
I first posted this story on the 3rd February 2021 on the website of my currently sleeping training company RIPEN. As anything shifted / changed in the last 4 years?…. Imagine if, our call to he
Festival of Learning fireside chat
On the morning of Monday 12th May 2025 we began the Festival of Community Led Learning with a fireside chat. With hindsight, with the good weather and deck chairs in the public living room perhaps we
Festival of learning
It’s three weeks since we hosted the Festival of Learning and it feels timely to begin to put on record some of the learning and shared experiences. We asked the question, ‘What reveals it
Annual Report 23-24
We’ve spent the last few weeks pulling together the annual report ready to accompany the accounts in the New Year. Here is the report. And if you fancy some dulcet Wigan tones, you can take a li
Here Comes Grinch
Sorry to be the party pooper in the run up to the festive season, but I just find all this poverty soothing so difficult to watch and it’s really ramped up at this time of year. You might want to st
The Hills are alive with sense making
Anyone who knows me well, will have heard me say, that hill walking is where I make sense of things. In the midst of nature, as a tiny dot on the landscape, things just start to make sense and d