The 7+ year Everyone Everyday initiative has concluded and its parent organisation - Participatory City Foundation - is being wound up.
Everyone Everyday was one of the most generously funded and high-profile community development schemes of its generation. At one point it was claimed that Everyone Everyday was the largest participatory project in Britain.
It was in the top three of Esmee Fairbairn Foundation’s highest funded projects and it was supported with millions of pounds from Barking and Dagenham Council, the National Lottery Community Fund, the Greater London Authority, City Bridge Trust and others.
In total over £9 million of mostly public money was invested in the scheme.
For several years Everyone Everyday featured regularly in the national media, lauded as a vehicle of public realm, economic and neighbourhood renewal with transformative and UK-wide potential. It was championed by well-known think-tanks such as NESTA as well as a range of well-established political academics, journalists and policy experts.
“One London borough has been bringing people together to work, socialise and dream. The results are extraordinary [...] Perhaps it’s not the whole answer to our many troubles. But it looks to me like a bright light in a darkening world.” George Monbiot, The Guardian, 24 January 2019.
“This is an initiative not afraid to set bold objectives and to be accountable for their achievement” Matthew Taylor, Chief Executive, RSA, 2019.
“Simply put, it provides an inspiration for us to re-imagine how we live and work together in the future.” Jayne Engle, McConnell Foundation, 2019
“It is no exaggeration to say it is work like this which can save the world […] we should realise it is one of the biggest sources of hope in a profoundly dark time.” Marc Stears, Sydney Policy Lab, 2019.
Since our last blog piece about this in March we have accessed and reviewed copies of this project’s original 2016-7 funding bids, and we have been unable to identify any single target set out in these documents that has successfully been met in full by the Everyone Everyday project.
This may explain the silence since the project ended earlier this summer of this initiative’s original funders and high profile champions. Whatever the reason for this lack of comment, we will use this space to offer a critical assessment of this massively expensive and much publicised initiative, using a range of evidence.
In this blog we draw out two key problems that gravely hampered this project right from the start and throughout its 7+ years:
Its highly touted approach to community development, which in our opinion was over-blown, ungrounded and fatally-flawed;
The failure (despite the project’s focus on civic participation) to build in any effective public accountability or community representation into this project’s organisation and governance.
These two problems contributed to the squandering of millions of pounds of community development investment and to large numbers of residents being left high and dry; these problems therefore also go some way to explain the overall failure of Everyone Everyday.
In this blog we also analyse how this situation was enabled by power-holders and point to changes needed to funding arrangements. This blog also calls for an independent public investigation to examine these issues in more depth.
Why all the excitement?
In 2017 the Everyone Everyday project promised to facilitate citizen-led community development using an innovative new ‘participation platform’ to create ‘socially designed’ forms of community infrastructure, with the wide-ranging and ambitious aim of delivering significant economic and social renewal in the Barking area, long into the future.
In the midst of advancing inequality in 2017, many communities across Britain were already well past the point of any investment being a ‘nice to have’. In this context investing this extra £9 million+ of money was never going to be enough, especially as at the same time millions more were also being extracted from the borough, as a result of London’s economic system and the cuts enforced by austerity.
Barking is one of the boroughs in London with the highest levels of unmet basic needs. There is almost nowhere else in this part of Britain where such renewal is more urgently required.
The timing of this project therefore came at a critical moment in the history of the resourcing of vital social infrastructure and community development in Barking and Dagenham.
Due to these and other pressures there was a moral and political obligation to ensure that every benefit that could flow from this money into the community would be maximised; and that a tangible material legacy resulted from this project for residents.
This is why we are calling for a full independent public investigation: it is needed to generate a more widely shared public understanding of what went wrong with the Everyone Everyday project; to provide the basis on which the institutions involved can publicly acknowledge the project’s failure and provide redress; and so that learning emerges from this process that will inform future public decision-making.
Developing communities in unsettled times
The so-called ‘centre’ of politics has been moving further and further rightwards since Everyone Everyday was first funded, with the recent spate of violent racist riots demonstrating quite how dangerous and terrifying a situation this politics can create.
The problems of poverty, inequality, alienation, inadequate provision of health care and housing, institutional detachment and racism are currently fueling the growth of the far-right in many British communities. This begs the question of what the most effective forms of community development are to address these problems.
Our assertion is that elitist, paternalistic, overly hierarchical and extractive projects, exemplified here by the case of Everyone Everyday, represent the opposite of what’s needed in this increasingly fraught and austerity-raddled situation.
In the case of Everyone Everyday, a group of supposedly ‘apolitical’ ‘social designers’, managed to persuade power-holders that they would bring about transformative change, claiming they had the expertise needed to operate in creative and technical realms beyond the bounds of existing practices.
But in doing so they ended up revealing great hubris about their abilities and the capacity of their supposedly ‘innovative’ approach. They showed contempt for the basic unmet needs and priorities articulated by local communities and grassroots groups in Barking. And disdain for the basic structures and dynamics that were shaping the growing inequalities of the local area.
For example, the project’s leadership team actively prohibited a number of pre-existing and well trusted local grassroots groups from their project spaces, using their charitable mission as a pretext to label such groups as overly ‘political’.
Even when these groups had worked for many years on similar issues to those that Everyone Everyday claimed it was going to address, the project’s leadership team insisted that they could do a better job of facilitating on-the-ground change.
Rather than being ‘apolitical’ as they had claimed they would be, by refusing to be held properly accountable or embed community representation in the organisation of the project, the Everyone Everyday team acted in highly political ways.
They had privileged access to resources and institutions and were organised and governed in a very hierarchical way. In these and many other ways, the new initiative was deeply entangled with issues of power, democracy, accountability, representation and control right from the start.
The broken promises of Everyone Everyday
Everyone Everyday’s original 2016-17 funding bids to the National Lottery Community Fund and the GLA Good Growth Fund, which were obtained through Freedom of Information requests, set out a list of the project’s key targets. The bids and the targets they set out serve as a timely reminder of the basis on which this ambitious and ‘innovative’ scheme was deemed fundable at that time.
One of these targets is for Everyone Everyday to involve a minimum of 27,000 of Barking’s residents. However, residents’ and grassroots groups have reported that this project involved only a fraction of that total number over the 5 year period, with only small groups of local people regularly participating in project activities.
Turning specifically to the successful GLA Good Growth Fund bid, this stressed that Everyone Everyday project had merit as it would deliver urgently needed community infrastructure, as well as other new assets and benefits, including:
“A permanent free, public co-working space for the benefit of residents of the borough”
In fact, the total of £850,000 of capital funds, earmarked specifically in the original bid for the construction of a new building for community use, was repurposed by the Everyone Everyday team to fit out an existing warehouse.
Rather than this warehouse becoming the publicly accessible and free-to-access space that would be available to residents of the borough in perpetuity, as was promised, Everyone Everyday ended up delivering space that had restrictions on access, was only open at limited times and was only available for community use on a temporary basis.
After the project’s funding ran out, this warehouse space was then permanently closed and put back on the market for commercial rent (and thereby put beyond the use of local residents) in Autumn 2023 and is still empty.
But how effectively was the Warehouse utilised during the time it was open and managed by Everyone Everyday?
The GLA bid promised that the Everyone Everyday project would ‘incubate’ ‘80 new businesses’ but this target was not met; and neither was the stated target of ‘250 residents becoming employed’ as a result of this project; or the target of 250 residents who would ‘receive formal education’, or that of the 150 who would gain ‘apprenticeships’ at the Warehouse.
The successful £1.9 million National Lottery Community Fund bid committed Everyone Everyday to delivering an even more breath-taking range of outcomes - including incubating a greater number of new businesses (250) and organising 20 new ‘shared kitchens’ to get off the ground.
The kitchens, this bid stated, would produce 125,000 meals for residents per annum by the project end-date, alongside 160,000 baby meals. None of these targets were met.
The 150 ‘open orchard sites’ and 4,500 new public fruit trees that the bids promised have never been planted; and it’s the same story with the 240 bee hives that were to be delivered with this grant money.
The 60 ‘public tool sheds’ and 60 bike fixing stations that were promised were also never organised or installed.
Perhaps even more worryingly, there is no sign of the 510 renewable energy sites (30 per ward) that Everyone Everyday committed to initiating and delivering.
This project’s ambitious smoking cessation objectives; and its targets for increasing physical activity in the borough (by 25,000 additional hours); and its commitments to reduce re-offending and substance misuse rates weren’t delivered on either.
These are just a few examples of targets and commitments that have been reneged on.
Missing all these targets (and more) had a predictably cumulative impact: it meant that Everyone Everyday failed to realise its fundamental commitment to bringing about economic, social and infrastructural change.
Legacies?
When reading Everyone Everyday’s final report it is easy to forget that the project made the following pledge in its original bids:
“We want to assure residents that longevity will be completely built into how the project develops - that our intention from the beginning will not be to come and go. If we are asking local people to invest heavily with their ideas, energies and aspirations we want to match that by ensuring that the infrastructures that are built continue to be funded”. (National Lottery Community Fund bid)
A promise was made on this basis to “found an independent foundation [called the Barking and Dagenham Foundation] with its own endowment [of £30 million or approx £1.2 million per annum in perpetuity] to ensure we deliver on this commitment”.
The diagram below outlines the process that was envisaged:
The funding needed to enable the continuity of this community development process was not secured, which meant the Barking and Dagenham Foundation was never set up. The project team has now been disbanded.
It was left to local people to mount their own Save the Warehouse campaign. This resident-led group invested significant time and effort into making the case for the Warehouse to remain open to them after the Everyone Everyday project crumbled. They even presented their own business case as part of their campaign, which was well argued and evidenced, but once again not supported.
These principled and capable local people are briefly referred to in the project’s final evaluation report. Though by characterising the people involved as ‘sad’ ‘confused’ and ‘upset’, the report seemingly pathologises these campaigners.
These campaigners should have been listened to, supported and co-operated with on equal terms. Instead of maligning them, committed residents’ should have been offered public accountability for the closure of their warehouse and the large amounts of community development funding that was poorly utilised.
This all happened despite the £6.8 million of mostly public money that was spent on resourcing the salaries of the project’s staff - a team that has failed to explain why this project has been unable to meet its own targets and who’s CEO took home over £100k per year.
Flawed, over-blown and spurning public accountability
The Everyone Everyday team published its own end of project report in July 2024.
Breaking with sector conventions, by avoiding external and independent end of project evaluation, the in-house evaluation report fails to include the list of key project targets set out in Everyone Everyday’s successful 2016-17 funding bids.
This omission serves to conceal the basis on which this project was originally funded, making it impossible for readers to undertake any systematic assessment of the overall effectiveness of the project’s implementation.
And if anyone was minded to mount their own independent search online for Everyone Everyday’s original list of this project’s targets, this would also be impossible, since copies of the original funding bids are not publicly available. These documents have only been accessed by us as a result of a series of Freedom of Information requests, for which we had to wait four to six months for a response.
The project’s in-house evaluation report follows a similar pattern to previous in-house Everyone Everyday publications inasmuch as it offers a random selection of data alongside a small number of hand-picked and rather thin ‘case studies’. This hotchpotch of data is then used to back-up a set of unsubstantiated assertions about the project’s success.
Local experience is that the project’s yearly publications have not reflected the reality of many residents’ lived experiences, either in terms of the number of people attending events, the use of the Warehouse or the overall reach and popularity of this scheme.
A degree of scepticism is therefore justified regarding the reliability and the efficacy of the quantitative and qualitative data presented in the recent report, which reads more like a public relations spin piece than the kind of robust and research-based analysis that would be expected at the end of a £9 million+ 7+ year public initiative
The report airbrushes everything that clearly went wrong. This underlines the need for a more considered and independent process of evaluation.
One of the claims made in the original funding bids is especially bold and pertinent here too. This is that Everyone Everyday would free residents from pre-existing constraints on civic participation and thereby enable the flourishing of community-led forms of local development.
The Everyone Everyday project did support a relatively modest (given its extensive funding and exaggerated claims) amount of resident involvement in Barking, since it provided a range of free pre-designed participatory activities.
However, rather than the project supercharging citizen participation in local community development, the initiative ended up igniting significant and sustained local resistance and public controversy in Barking.
As we have documented in previous posts, groups of residents and pre-existing grassroots groups repeatedly clashed both with the Everyone Everyday and local authority leadership teams.
The project’s senior leadership team repeatedly compounded these difficulties, by resisting external scrutiny and engagement, highlighting again how their stubborn objections to learning, ongoing evaluation and iterative adjustment were counter-productive.
Offers of cooperation from concerned local groups were rejected. Proposals that came forward aiming to improve the project’s prospects were ignored. During this time Everyone Everyday simply continued to publicise the unbridled success of the project via expensive and wasteful marketing campaigns and borough-wide ‘newsletter’ drops.
Rather than negotiating with local residents or introducing greater public accountability, or new forms of community representation, which at earlier stages could have improved the project’s effectiveness, the team repeatedly doubled-down in defence of their pre-existing ‘model’.
Senior leaders consistently insisted that residents should participate on terms set by Everyone Everyday, to realise the project’s largely preconceived vision of participation and its outcomes.
The idea that it might be more useful for this project to support citizens and local groups to lead a process of community development, for themselves, was anathema.
This unresponsiveness of project’s leaders to emerging and repeatedly-flagged structural, governance and delivery problems should have been a serious warning sign for funders and the local authority. Instead, the relatively unfettered freedom Everyone Everyday’s leadership team was given allowed millions of pounds of mostly public money to be spent with relative impunity, over a 7 year period.
‘Community power’
It was not just the Everyone Everyday leadership team, its funders and public authority backers that neglected their public responsibilities. A whole host of other groups and professionals from the wider sector failed to speak out publicly, despite the serious reservations many of them privately harboured.
One reason for this lack of collective accountability lies, we believe, in the deeply hierarchical and unequal relations of power that structure the funding of the community development sector.
This imbalance leads to professionals needing to maintain ‘positive’ and largely uncritical relationships with funding institutions, to ensure community development work is supported and remains sustainable, especially in ‘hard times’.
We found this to be the case in Barking. We have been told that the local authority regularly threatened to withdraw funding from any local group who wanted to speak out.
Power holders were able to divide and rule in the borough and Everyone Everyday was able to evade public scrutiny as a result.
This is the background against which it eventually proved impossible to build the strong coalition of voices and organisations that would have been needed to resist the imposition of this project in Barking, or at least change its governance, or revise its approach.
We will now never know what might have been possible had Everyone Everyday’s significant resources been redirected into more progressive and productive directions.
Getting the story straight?
As a result of the all-too-real struggles that took place between residents’ and the Everyone Everyday leadership over its efficacy, two substantially different understandings of this project came to circulate in the public domain:
Propagated primarily by the Everyone Everyday leadership team, the first of these understandings stressed that the Everyone Everyday project was innovative, transformative and successful. This success, they emphasised, meant that their overall approach deserved further investment and even replication in other places.
This is the understanding that was recently publicised by Everyone Everyday’s final report. It’s also the understanding of the project that its institutional enablers remain wedded to, at least publicly.
The second, quite different understanding, erupted into the public realm as a result of the work of the local residents, some of whom later came together to lead the Save the Warehouse campaign.
This alternative understanding stressed how disruptive and problematic the experience of the Everyone Everyday project was for them, not just because of its failure to be publicly accountable and representative of the community; but also because it failed to deliver its promised outcomes and legacy.
Over the 7+ years of the Everyone Everyday project, these starkly contrasting understandings, have vied and struggled with each other for public recognition and institutional legitimacy.
The price of predation
Based on these two understandings, it is useful to draw a distinction between what we call ‘predatory’ and more ‘progressive’ forms of community development.
Progressive community development, we suggest, supports collectives of local people to respond to unmet needs and priorities on the ground; embraces publicly-accountability and community representation; supports communities to rise to the challenges of living in an increasingly extractive, undemocratic and exploitative economy; and invests in local groups working to develop alternatives.
Predatory forms, in contrast, work primarily in the interests of pre-existing power-holders. Power-holders who may, as they did in this case, say that they are working in the interests of local communities, but then fail to embed public accountability or community representation in their project’s organisation; and also who fail to support the development of alternatives to the extractive, undemocratic, hierarchical and increasingly unequal status quo.
If institutions, including local authorities and big funders, are to take the urgent action necessary to support progressive approaches to community development, they will first need to reject predatory forms outright.
Learning lessons
The intention of these blog pieces hasn’t been to characterise Everyone Everyday as a rogue outlier, or a bad apple, or a project that no-one should ever speak of again.
Neither have we intended to suggest that a pure, authentic, grassroots approach to community development exists that Everyone Everyday has deviantly veered away from.
People and local groups will always take their creative inspiration from multiple sources and ‘innovation’ in this sector can often clearly be beneficial, just as it can sometimes cause harm.
However it is never justifiable to posit a new ‘model’ of community development as a solution to the problems of a particular place which then doesn’t integrate a process of cooperation with trusted pre-existing groups and which displaces critical grassroots voices.
Everyone Everyday did precisely this. And this was partly facilitated by the relatively unregulated space it helped create, between public and private funding, state and entrepreneur-led ‘enterprise’.
The local authority enabled this project, in part, because it welcomed the new money brought in by this third-sector start-up and because it sought the publicity that followed the ‘innovative’ Everyone Everyday approach.
However, as a result, Barking became an even more unaccountable and unstable space than it had previously been. Then when this project faltered and failed, significant damage followed for the community and the institutions who evaded their responsibilities, further reinforcing distrust.
Pragmatism in ‘hard times’
Everyone Everyday’s other enablers were a set of trusts and foundations, some of which divest public money. These funders identify as ‘apolitical’ and also exist in an in-between space, associated with a combination of public institutions, private businesses and community based groups, lobbying the government to advocate for greater resources.
Big funders are, ostensibly at least, non-aligned and claim to exist somewhere in the ‘pragmatic’ ‘centre-ground’ of public life. Their role, as they typically see it, is to resource projects that supposedly champion ‘common-sense’ and the ‘public good’. It was in this context that the big funders invested in Everyone Everyday.
This supposed ‘centre-ground’ of British public life and ‘common-sense’ pragmatism, that so many of our institutions have long claimed to be guided by, had already moved rightwards in 2017. As it is currently moving further and further towards the far-right, how should institutions respond?
Should the big funders hold on to the idea that they are ‘apolitical’? Should they remain wedded to their brand of pragmatism and continue to try to align with the supposed centre-ground, even as it accelerates rightwards?
Given the spending power of these funders it is unsurprising that many sector professionals are wary about speaking out, since in the current political context they undoubtedly run the risk of being labelled as ‘disruptive’ or ‘radical’.
Conformity to the often reactionary ‘common-sense’ of the moment is an implicit expectation of participation and belonging in ‘the sector’. However, without concerted collective action, to publicly address the dangers of the rightwards drift it is unlikely that anything much will change.
We know of no currently functioning public forum, or comparable ‘safe space’, where the failings of projects like Everyone Everyday can be collectively, transparently and critically examined, and candid conversations can take place about how funds are divested.
This situation provides another reason why an independent investigation is needed with the remit to make recommendations for future practice.
Conclusions
It appears that the big funders and other associated mainstream institutions are looking in vain to square a circle: trying to somehow keep up with the ever right-ward-drifting ‘centre’ of British political ‘common-sense’; while, at the same time, attempting to somehow represent and effectively invest in progressive sounding forms of community empowerment and local development.
However, the contradictions here are too great and this is a circle that it is impossible to square. This current approach is unsustainable and politically irresponsible. It threatens to exclude many of the grassroots groups with the most progressive potential and that funders should most urgently be supporting.
Our conclusion is that we have reached the point where we need new institutions which can act swiftly to help reverse the damage being wrought by the extractive economy and the drift towards the far-right.
We need new institutions that are prepared to make a stand and that will direct their resources into helping build democratic and progressive community development alternatives from the ground up.
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