Creating a community of communities in the South Wales Valleys

Leanne Wood and Beth Winter

Community is everything – This statement made in one of the valleys community assemblies we organised, summed up a mood.

Although we are from different political traditions, we both got together to see what positive work we could do in the valleys, using our experiences of the political system and learning from our roles as former representives of valleys communities.

Problems in some of our communities are deep, but we are of the view that most of the causes are economic at base. Could we facilitate discussions to address some of these problems?

We have both been inspired by the work of the late Sel Williams and the Cymunedoli network in Gwynedd, which in turn has been inspired by the writings of Raymond Williams, writer and cultural critic from Pandy near Abergavenny, who wrote extensively about the power of community.

He saw Wales as a ‘community of communities’ advocated for ‘real independence’, which is more than simply constitutional change.

Success

We wanted to see if something similar to Cymunedoli could be created in the valleys. We started with three events funded by a small grant from the Raymond Williams Foundation. The first was held on a cold, January night in Gurnos social club in Merthyr Tudfil.

The second was in St. Elvan’s Church in Aberdare on a sunny St. David’s day morning as part of a weekend of events commemorating the end of the miners’ strike, which also included the showing of a film about community wealth building, commissioned by Beth.

The last assembly was at the end of March in the Railway Canteen Club in Treherbert. We began by outlining the work of Cymunedoli and providing examples of successful community businesses. Cymunedoli is a network of forty five (and growing) community businesses, cooperatives and social enterprises in Gwynedd. There are plans to extend the network to cover the whole of Cymru.

Cymunedoli prioritises communities by creating wealth through ‘owning, managing and socialising local resources, keeping the benefit locally and sharing it within our communities’.

Challenges

It is a more sustainable form of economic development than the traditional model which extracts profits from the local community. A model in part responsible for the economic challenges faced in this country today.

Cymunedoli offers an alternative that benefits the community by stimulating the local economy. We have some community businesses in the valleys that can be a part of Cymunedoli, but too few.

That’s something we hope to be able to change. We want the valleys to be part of this network, and eventual ‘parliament of communities’, similar to Sweden, where more than a thousand community groups have formed a formidable power bloc.

Cymunedoli was started by the late Sel Williams and his comrades in and around Blaenau
Ffestiniog – a small former slate mining town. It began with a group of community businesses in the Bro Ffestiniog area, which covers a population of around 8,000 people.

There are high poverty levels there that come with being a post-industrial area, much like the valleys. The network has now expanded beyond Bro Ffestiniog to cover the county of Gwynedd.

Cwmni Bro Ffestiniog is the umbrella body for the fifteen businesses in the Bro, which are
democratically run with profits redistributed locally. The Cwmni provides services for the local community and tourists.

No accident

A mountain bike trail and bike hire business, a fully disabled-accessible hotel, a pub, a clothing and homewares recycling centre, a music venue and a community radio station are some of the businesses which make up Cwmni Bro Ffestiniog.

Elsewhere in Gwynedd, people in Bethesda got together a few years ago and created Ynni
Ogwen, a community energy company. They crowd-funded to purchase a micro-hydro turbine &
grid connection which has helped to fund a solar panel business.

These investments bring in an income for Partneiriaeth Ogwen to buy shops, flats, a community owned electric bus, land for parking and food growing. They own the former school which has been turned into a community hub with office hot desk space and EV car charging.

It’s no accident that this is happening in Gwynedd. The first community-owned workers’
cooperative was set up in the village of Llanaelhaearn on the Llyn peninsula in the 1970s by 210 villagers to stem the tide of economic decline in their area.

You can read more about that here.

Our mining ancestors pooled their resources to build community facilities, such libraries, social halls and parks. Let’s not forget the NHS was born here. The first consumer cooperative in Wales started in Cwmbach in Cwm Cynon in 1859. And the workers’ buy-out of Tower Colliery in Hirwaun in 1995 was just up the road from there.

Potential

We already have good examples to build on in the valleys. In the Treherbert community assembly, we heard about the work of Welcome to our Woods, who have seen major successes as a community woodland management business. This model can be replicated elsewhere and if people see what is possible, there is potential for action.

The discussions in these community assemblies have shown a hunger for a mindset shift and for new way of doing things. There is an acceptance that what’s been done before has failed.

There is a real appetite to end dependence on handouts from politicians and for the pooling of local strengths and resources to build viable, sustainable community-owned businesses.

Everyone can contribute something to that. And economically and socially strong communities are in a better position to withstand both the economic and climate based risks we face, as well as the attempts to divide us.

Some brilliant ideas for community wealth building action have emerged from the community
assemblies and each one has its own summary report from which they can develop an action plan.

Community-owned wind turbines and solar panels were popular, as were ideas for tourism
businesses. Other ideas included local lotteries and currencies, community land purchases and food growing and sharing were also suggested.

Most importantly, people talked. We got off our screens and we shared ideas, thoughts, concerns. We talked with people we didn’t know and realised we had a lot of thinking in common. And everyone recognised that this doesn’t happen as often as it should.

It’s clear from these conversations that everybody knows and understands the strengths we have in the valleys. Everybody understands that the community spirit that binds us all has the potential to bring people together to cooperate for the good of all. As it has in the past.

We very much hope we can build on this enthusiasm and energy to create a “Valleys Cymunedoli Cymoedd”, in turn becoming part of a national network; a ‘community of communities’ practising ‘real independence’ to become an unstoppable force of nature, as was envisioned by Sel Williams.