WHAT TO EXPECT
This won’t be two days of people talking at you.
Across the Assembly, expect:
- Short, focused talks and provocations
- Stories from Coalfield history
- People sharing what they’re building today
- Inspiring examples from elsewhere
- Film and archive material
- Facilitated discussions
- Practical workshops
- Creative activities
- Music, poetry and culture
- Opportunities to meet organisations from across the region
- Space to challenge and test the ideas being presented
- Practical conversations about what we do next
You’ll be invited to contribute your own experience throughout. The ideas we’re bringing to the Assembly are there to be tested: what’s right, what’s wrong, what’s missing and what needs changing?
Come ready to join, share, explore, test and shape.
WHO IS THE ASSEMBLY FOR?
If you’re passionate about communities, where you live, or simply want to hear inspiring people and ideas, we want you in the room.
The Assembly’s history, programme and central questions are rooted in the Durham Coalfield - the communities stretching from the Tyne to the Tees. But the challenges we are exploring don’t stop at old administrative or industrial boundaries, and neither does the invitation.
We want people and organisations from across the North East to take part, including:
- Community centres, miners halls and welfare organisations
- Mutual-aid groups, food projects, advice and support services
- Youth and children’s organisations
- Arts, heritage, music, theatre and cultural organisations
- Environmental and place-based initiatives
- Co-operatives and social enterprises
- Community businesses
- Community asset owners
- Community land and development trusts
- Tenants, residents and neighbourhood groups
- Trade unions and trades councils
- Campaigns and civic action groups
- Organisations developing community ownership, enterprise or local investment
You don’t need to represent a large or professional organisation. In fact, we particularly want small, grassroots and volunteer-led organisations to be represented.
What makes a decent life possible?
Good work. Places we own and value. Support when we need it. A healthy environment. Culture and belonging. And the power to shape what happens in our communities.
For generations, communities across the Durham Coalfield built many of these things for themselves. Working people did not simply build an industry. They built welfare halls and institutes, co-operatives, healthcare, education, parks and sports grounds, trade unions, culture and democratic institutions. They pooled resources, owned assets together and created institutions that gave ordinary people genuine influence over the places where they lived.
At the heart of that system was Redhills. In the Pitman's Parliament, representatives from mining communities across the Coalfield came together to make decisions, pool resources and exercise collective power. They called what they built their Commonwealth.
Over the past forty years, much of that Common Wealth has been systematically and deliberately dismantled. Industries were shut down. Wealth was, and continues to be, extracted. Democratic power was leached from our communities and concentrated elsewhere. Institutions that generations had built were weakened, abolished, sold, transferred or allowed to fail.
Photography: Sally Ann Norman
Photography: Sally Ann Norman
But the story doesn't end there.
Across our communities, people are already building again: taking ownership of buildings and land, creating community businesses, organising mutual support, making culture, developing new forms of local enterprise and finding ways for communities to exercise greater control over their future.
The Redhills Assembly is about bringing that work together and asking a bold question:
How can our communities once again build the collective wealth and power to shape their own futures?
Over two days, people and organisations from across the North East will come together at Redhills to learn from our history, share what's working now, explore ideas from elsewhere and develop practical ways of rebuilding our Coalfield Common Wealth.
This isn't a conventional conference. It's a working Assembly built around participation, discussion, creativity and action.
What did our communities build? What was taken away? What survived? What are we rebuilding now? And how do we turn individual examples into lasting collective power?