Grass Roots of Wigan

This week has been a glorious week in many ways and this morning capped it off when we officially agreed some kind of governing ideas for Grass Roots of Wigan, GRoW. 

This work has grown out of the pot of cash that we received from Power to Change via Empowering Places & Wigan & Leigh Community Charity to try out some localised participatory budgeting.

We tried it out, experienced some glorious failures and some even more glorious successes and a few of the women agreed to stick together and do a bit more. You can read more about what we did together here. 

This morning the founders agreed, by consensus, the official formation of a new network called GRoW – Grass Roots of Wigan. We’ve been working on it for a while and hope to launch fully at a bit of a party towards the end of October. We’ve work to do before then,  building the Decidim platform that we’ve chosen to host some of the work on. 

This is what we’ve decided we are about. 

If this is the beat that you move to, get in touch 🙂 

Grass Roots of Wigan (GRoW)

Routes to Community Growth through Solidarity

Grass Roots of Wigan is a community led network for people who live and breathe community life.

An open network where we have the space to bounce ideas around, offer and receive mutual support, learn together and from each other and stand together in solidarity. 

We want to see:

New growth in every community 

People believing that it is possible to make changes and grow community life 

People feeling that their views matter and are important and can contribute to community life

People feeling inspired by seeing what they and others can and are doing

More people getting involved in all communities and taking ownership

Lots of different people finding ways to work together for the common good

Communities collaborating and working together in solidarity 

A reduction in red tape that can get in the way of community growth 

If this happens then we might see:

Communities becoming more connected, stronger, healthier and wealthier. 

We do this by:

Monthly network gatherings to exchange ideas and learning 

Annual festival

Securing monies and redistributing to enable grass root communities to grow collectively and in solidarity 

Hosting a platform that supports communities to make collective decisions online and onland 

Grass Roots of Wigan is predominately for the communities of Wigan.  

Neighbouring friends are welcome to join for mutual support. 

As a decentralised network we work collaboratively and openly.  

The network is independent and non partisan.   

These aims were agreed by the founding members on the 21^st July 2023.

They will be accompanied by documents which outline the way we make decisions, raise, use and distribute resources.