What do you want me to say?
Well say look this is the start of a trip around England and Wales.
In the middle of this quite –
Like that in the middle of this very ...
Yeah.
Deep, increasingly deep social crisis,
so it's that sort of stuff, you want some of that?
Yeah.
But make it sound conversational?
Yeah.
Right.
It's clothes, it's bills, it's food.
This has been going on for too long, we're in poverty what are you gonna do about it?
It's more good than bad in this village, believe it or not,
but that's not what you want to hear it?
I think you'd rather go and print bad news than good news.
Do you know what, we have come to tell hopeful stories.
Oh I hope so.
About the amazing people doing amazing things to sort of hold their communities together.
We're a team aren't we, we work well don't we?
No one's going to help us so we need to get off our backsides and do it ourselves.
We offer food, cover essential parcels and the lights have gone off now.
They're all on sensors because of the cost of living crisis.
There we go.
It's a very slick operation, it doesn't look like it, it looks crazy in here,
but I promise you it is.
We’re right in one of the most deprived areas of London
and they've had a tough two, three years
and there's no let up, no let up.
One damn thing after another.
When we started we had 13 families in a week, now we're getting 1,300 families a week.
A hundred-fold increase?
From 9 April 2020 to this week.
You feel you're being sort of cared for, that people are looking out for you?
Yep and I'm meeting friends so.
Yeah, so it has a sort of social element to it as well.
Yeah, yeah.
And if this wasn't here?
I don't know I'd definitely be suffering you know?
Yeah, yeah.
Picking up things where, I don't know, from the street or asking for –
Yeah things are hard.
Right in the middle of probably one of the wealthiest cities in the world right?
The people who need the most basic help.
We're a food hub, not a food bank.
So we're giving out clothes now at the moment,
nappies, babies items.
We've kind of become much more of a kind of wraparound service,
job search for example, we have somebody who comes to help with debt management.
But the glue that holds it all together if you like –
Yeah, yeah.
The starting point is everybody needs food first.
There's many people that will come back and they will say,
you've made an impact on my life
and I can go home and I can eat and make food
or I can feed my baby.
I've got the items I need to carry on going.
So government what are you you going to do to improve this?
What are you gonna do to improve people's health, well-being
and people do not have to resort to this.
Now if you've been watching this series for as long as we've been making it,
you will know that at first we sort of made it our mission to show how bad things were.
Which was necessary work but after a while we had a rethink
and we wanted to go and find people doing things that gave us a sense of hope
and that pointed to the future.
Now it so happens that this year's Guardian Christmas appeal
is all about raising money for exactly those sorts of organisation.
Right next is Leeds.
Right let's get to work.
It's really cold.
We're in search of a cup of tea, a cafe run by an organisation called 'Health For All'.
Hello.
Hello, are you Pat?
Come in and warm up, honestly.
This is one of six community spaces in Leeds run by Health For All.
There's a food pantry here and a cafe and it also serves as a warm space.
We do like different jobs, different rotas,
so involves cooking we make a lot of nice food actually,
cheese and onion quiches, chili con carne, Chinese chicken curry,
make all sorts.
We do our best and we have fun so we just get to be ourselves
and have a laugh.
Brilliant, great.
Good team.
Thank you.
Thank you, yeah.
You're good at this.
And also we have like a food bank which is in the back.
Show us, show us the pantry.
It's £3.50 so the price is quite good actually,
yeah, cost of living and stuff and all that.
Price is going up, but we do our best.
There's a lot of people using this.
Yeah, yeah.
Oh yeah there's a waiting list.
And this is my friend in front volunteer, Stacy.
Hello Stacy.
Hi.
Yeah, we're a team aren't we, we work well don't we?
Yeah, yeah.
These food pantries I'll admit I've used them.
So when you say you go I admit, tell me why you say that.
Because there's a lot of people who won't have the guts to go to them,
because they feel embarrassed.
That's why I do that,
but to me my family is important to be able to feed them.
I run a disability group, it's heartbreaking for me with running a group
to see these families literally and I mean literally struggling
and then I've gotten where they're actually crying.
When I first started out it, when I went to do my disability group,
I went to Health For All and they was absolutely amazing,
they helped me set up the group.
The group has become just about 200 people now
with adults and children and it's one big happy family.
You're sort of seeding other organisations as you work or –
Yes, yeah what's crucial is having a place to meet,
so that's how we've ended up with six centres.
What's also crucial is having small grants.
Even if grants are £500, seed funding would help to set up a group
in a deprived area, a peer support group.
That's our Beeston village centre.
So this was a disused library, the library closed down
and it was at risk of demolition.
this is a sort of room full of an amazing sort of diverse array of cultures and languages
and people and I think we're about to hear a Cantonese choir.
So many people are turning up and are seeking for this community group
to get together.
People said there's no affordable heating,
they have to really set it up at a certain time
and maybe wrap up to stay warm.
We're a long way from Westminster.
It's a really hard to afford the money, to afford the food, bills.
I can not work full time because I have four children,
I have a baby.
You don't have to do this.
No I need to do this.
You need to do it?
Yeah, I want to do this, you know, it's coming from inside.
You know, I have that feeling if I'm not do this,
who else will do this, you know?
We need the people in our community to be dedicated to support our community,
to help the people around.
Well we've now switched to another mode of transport.
On this slightly madcap tour,
Pat here has given us a lift to a different part of Leeds.
Right.
Pat you're gonna save another another community centre,
we're now going to a project which is all about cooking.
This is proper grassroots this.
You want to film down here?
Good luck with that.
Another community garden.
Hi.
Hi sorry we're late, we're idiots.
Well you said it.
He's got a book coming out.
I know that's why he's don't it.
But at the end of the day him and Boris killed how many thousands of old people.
He got sacked.
Me personally I would have made him do a bush tucker trail with the crocodiles.
There's very strong opinions about Matt Hancock.
Well yeah.
So our government they don't think about us, they think about themselves.
They'll all get a decent pay rise, but the NHS, bus drivers,
mailmen, cleaners, we're all living day to day.
It's like I use my cooker what three, four times a week if that.
I live on sandwiches, cereal just to save money.
So this is a cook and eat group,
we're promoting home cooking and batch cooking as well
so that you can make enough food to feed for you for the night
and then have leftovers for the next days.
This is very different from say food banks init'
where you go and you just get what you're given.
Yeah.
Coming here I can say to Kelly oh can we make this.
We can have a laugh, we have a talk, we have a coffee,
it's relaxed.
And every friendship counts, don't it, we're making lots of memories
and they count also, no one can take those away from us, can they?
It's like an antidote to despair, you know what I mean?
Yeah.
See you.
We don't despair, we get on with things.
Right boys plan is this morning get this cleared,
we get rid of all this old timber,
keep the good stuff for what we need to use in our community garden.
Okay?
A group of volunteers are turning an old police station back into a community centre
of the kind we've seen all along this journey.
We've like lost a few, all the shops are shut there's not much employment in Maerdy.
Nowhere for people to go, so they shut down the local Teifi house
where the old age used to meet.
It's really important.
It is important.
The people here aren't meekly waiting for donations,
once again what they're doing opens a window onto a whole world of creativity and entrepreneurial spirit.
David our driver from the Arts Factory.
Alright Dav?
Ay?
We're just saying what you do with the driving and the books and that.
Explain to the boys about the books.
Well I just pick donations up, people donate books like libraries
that want to clear the shelves get a new stock in.
So we got a warehouse, we pick them up, sell them on Amazon
and that funds the projects
that have been going on at the Arts Factory.
A lot of this is kept running by book sales on Amazon?
Yeah.
And you're the picker?
That's what they call him.
Chief picker.
Van driver and chief picker.
Cheese and pickle.
Right lads.
Come on in, come in the garden, let me show you in the garden.
Well this area when they first took it over,
That’s all you had in here was broken down Portakabin.
You had an old oven in there, full of asbestos.
This year we're growing cucumbers, cabbage, lettuce, carrots,
we offer it out to the community at a low price.
You got everything going on here –
We have.
– second-hand books, growing vegetables.
Yep.
We're going to a tea dance in a bit.
Correct.
They're turning around a community centre.
Yeah.
It's all going on.
We know that we can't rely on funding,
because there's so much competition in the market now.
We get very little donations, so we have to be innovative.
So this is our Factory Books here guys.
Are you listing the book on Amazon there?
Yeah.
All right they're going quick.
That's very appropriate.
Very appropriate.
This is a project that people can work on
from all walks to life.
So people become providers instead of service users.
The whole thing for Arts Factory is no more throwaway people,
that's our strap-line.
Wow.
No more throwaway people.
Right we're driving through the mist to an estate on the outer edge of Bristol,
to the last stop on this purposely optimistic trip.
By the end I want to have completely forgotten who Jeremy Hunt is,
that's the idea.
So Lawrence Weston is about seven miles out of the centre of Bristol.
Yeah.
We're right on the outskirts so sometimes we're forgotten about.
Ah, you have that feeling?
Yeah, exactly, yeah.
We're becoming familiar with this.
Yeah.
A group of us, around about 40 residents come together and said right,
no one's going to help us so we need to get off our backsides and do it ourselves really.
It's the kind of story that's very familiar to us now.
So training, education, skills, transport, housing, advice, economy, food banks.
But that's not why we've come here.
Where'd you get your money?
Well after a drunken evening in a pub, talking to another resident
he said, yeah wouldn't it be a good idea to whack up a wind turbine.
Because we've got quite a few in the area,
but they've done to us, not with us.
So I said well we've had too much to drink let's go in,
but we had a serious conversation next morning and he said, why not?
It was not the beer talking, it was –
No.
Where are we going?
We're going to what will soon be the tallest onshore wind turbine in Britain
and it'll be owned by the community.
So this is all about bringing the people who live on the estate
cheaper energy, cheaper electricity.
It was originally, but unfortunately that can't be done
and so now what we need to do is sell our energy to the National Grid,
we're going to take that money and support the most vulnerable residents with their energy.
Wow.
This is fascinating so you're generating electricity, you're going to generate electricity
using this wind turbine?
Yeah.
Which you can then use to subsidise the bills of people
who are really at the sharp end.
Exactly.
Wow.
And other things.
And then there's a tiny little car park here, hopefully it's empty.
Sort of place gangster take people to kill them.
Because we've got low car ownership our gangsters do that a bit closer to home.
So how much does it cost to build a wind turbine?
£5 million.
£5 million there.
Hopefully it'll be up and turning in March '23.
So not long now
And after that the turbine will bring a £100,000 a year
back into the community of Lawrence Weston for 25 years.
So this is big right?
Right.
But the the Guardian's Christmas appeal which is to raise money for Locality,
which is the umbrella group that you're one small part of,
that’s about much smaller amounts, smaller projects,
why are those things important?
Because we wouldn't be here without those things,
our first investment was £10,000
and that's what kicked it all on that gave us some money to come train up our residents
and pay them to go out and do the door knocking to develop the community plan,
which in turn gave other investors confidence to come in and invest in us.
This thought pops into your head that keeps popping into our heads
wherever we go, which is why can't this happen everywhere?
Once places take the power for themselves, you know,
all sorts of interesting things start to happen.
All the groups we've seen on this trip are members of a huge network called Locality,
who the Guardian is raising money for in its Christmas appeal.
It makes sure grassroots projects like these can share money, ideas and knowledge,
that it seems to us is what the future ought to look like.
Here's one question we ask everybody right?
Go on.
How do you feel about the future?
Positive.
I'm only laughing because not many people say that.