CASH’s vision is to secure land to create more co-operative living, working and social spaces for the community. New housing projects will be affordable, sustainable, and secure.
How are we delivering our vision? A dedicated working group of CASH members explains our ambitious goals through a strategy-action document to be published in 2023. In it we lay out how exactly we go about making our first housing project happen. Regardless of the immediate priority for our CLT, we always keep three needs in sharp focus.
Housing
House prices and rents continue to increase while real term wages stagnate and interest rates are on the rise. It is increasingly hard for most people to afford buying a property or otherwise access secure accommodation, with London being the least affordable region in the country.
Housing crisis is not being appropriately addressed by regeneration schemes, often due to inadequate co-operation between developers, councils and the local community. CASH advocates community-first thinking and puts it into practice from the bottom-up.
Working
Most often we are employed to the job without a sense of ownership or control of the business we work for. Hierarchical work environments strip away meaningful input and foster powerlessness and burnout, leading to phenomenons such as great resignation and quiet qutting. Work should make us proud not merely because our salaries but due to the positive impact we have on the world and our communities. Embracing this urgent responsibility with a co-operative ownership structure offers an innovative force capable of overcoming single-minded desire for profit.
Living
Our communities are unequal, divided and set against each other. Loneliness is an endemic problem in densely populated UK cities. People dwell in their own bubbles, often not even knowing their neighbours. Racism and sexism remains a widespread feature of everyday life for many people in Britain and is still embedded in its institutions. As local community members we can take initiative to bring a variety of our backgrounds and create spaces of freedom and creativity, nurturing our generation and those to come.
Sustainability
Climate change can affect our health, ability to grow food, housing, safety and work. We must recognise the social inequality that exists in relation to the vulnerability to the impacts of climate change. We believe in the power of the co-operative movement to address the causes of climate change, enhance collective resilience and encourage people to live in harmony with nature. We must design with nature. Shifting our perspective, we can see humans as part of communal ecosystem of all living beings such as plants, animals, and the land itself. We all flourish when we work together within a network of reciprocity.
We have carried out a range of successful initiatives, even during most challenging times for face-to-face community groups. Find out more about a few of those projects and imagine yours!
