Supporting just and regenerative futures in the North East

The past we inherit, the future we build.

Miner's motto, Redhills

The North East is one of the places that helped build modern Britain, not only through its coal and industry but through generations of people who changed the rules of the game, refusing to accept the world as it was, and building something better together. That radical tradition lives on. This regional programme is one small part of that longer story in the region. Across the region, people are once again building fairer, more regenerative ways of living and working.

We’re putting more of JRF’s weight behind backing the people and places already leading the way, staying in relationship, listening deeply and using our resources with care. Because what’s been inherited here isn’t just history. It’s a foundation for futures that are less extractive, more secure, and worthy of the people who call this place home.

The past we inherit

The North East is often framed as a casualty of history, a region that prospered in the age of industry and then fell behind. The language of ‘left behind’ implies that national progress, globalisation and modernisation were themselves sound, and that this region simply failed to keep up. But working people here have always challenged the basis of that economic order.

This is a region that helped invent modernity, providing the labour, resources and infrastructure that shaped how the modern world would organise itself and who it would serve. The coal that powered its ships and factories did not just fuel British industry; it drove imperial expansion and bound this place into a global system built on the extraction of land, labour and lives. The economic order built in and through this region has always depended on somebody, somewhere, being sacrificed so that others can prosper.

Across generations, working people didn’t simply endure this system, they imagined and built alternatives. In the coalfield communities of County Durham, miners and their families confronted an economy that kept them in poverty, poor housing and ill health. What they achieved, from conditions of deep hardship, was extraordinary. By pooling wages and small contributions from thousands of households, they created vast systems of mutual support. At the heart of this stood Redhills, the Pitmen’s Parliament, built in 1915 and paid for through subscriptions from tens of thousands of miners and their families. Long before many had the right to vote, elected working-class delegates gathered in its oak-lined chamber to debate, decide and shape the future of their communities, learning how to organise, build power and use it for the common good.

They also knew real change meant shifting the power of the state. In an act of collective audacity, ordinary working people organised and won the creation of the Miners’ Welfare Fund, in effect, a wealth tax on mine owners. Every ton of coal carried a levy that raised the equivalent of tens of millions of pounds a year in today’s terms, funding halls, public baths, libraries and welfare across the coalfields. Around 80% of this money was democratically allocated by welfare committees run by communities, who decided how it should be spent on local priorities.

Coalfield communities created what can only be described as a self-made welfare state: establishing hospitals and medical provision, building homes for older miners, and providing sickness and unemployment support in times of crisis. They invested in education as a shared source of power rooted in everyday life. Miners’ institutes, libraries, reading rooms and members’ clubs functioned as civic schools as much as social spaces, where identity was forged, solidarity deepened and collective capacity grew.

Alongside this, communities built and sustained a powerful cultural and social infrastructure, grounded in the conviction that a good life required both ‘bread and roses’, not only enough to live on, but enough to live well. In the midst of extractive and gruelling working conditions (including the unpaid and often invisible labour of women who kept families and communities going), they carved out shared spaces for joy, imagination, creativity and connection, treating them as essential to human flourishing.

Out of meagre wages, families nurtured an everyday ecosystem of brass bands, local theatre, art classes and sports clubs, insisting that everyone should have access to culture, creativity and play. Welfare halls, libraries and stages became civic commons where people made sense of the world together. In those spaces, they knew themselves as workers, but also as citizens, with chances to make and share culture, to feel rooted in their community and place, and to find moments of creativity, play and joy that helped them not just survive, but thrive.

The present day

The coalfield communities still have not recovered from the trauma of deindustrialisation. Their beating heart was quite literally ripped out and never repaired.

Matt James Smith

Across the North East, communities are still living with the aftershocks of rapid deindustrialisation, compounded by decades of under-investment and austerity. What happened to the region wasn’t some natural, “post‑industrial” transition as time moved on. Deindustrialisation was something done to communities by political choices that shut industries down, dismantled institutions and rewired local economies around the interests of distant power.

The consequences are not hard to find. One in four people in the North East now lives in poverty, including one in three children. Life expectancy is lower, ill health more widespread, housing conditions worse and educational outcomes more unequal. These are not disconnected indicators; they are the long shadow of decisions made decades ago and never repaired.

The parallel exploitation and extraction of people and places is not just a chapter in the history books; it is still happening.

Towns that once led the world in pay and living standards are now positioned and advertised as low-cost locations which are attractive to global capital precisely because land is cheap, wages are low and workers have weak bargaining power. This region also carries a double burden of environmental harm. It is dealing with inherited climate debt from heavy industry, as well as new forms of intensive infrastructure, such as AI data centre developments which will consume vast amounts of energy with significant environmental impact. In Teeside, the dredging of the River Tees in recent years has killed marine life, damaged already fragile ecosystems and pushed the local fishing industry to the brink of collapse.

The social spaces and infrastructure that supported communities to come together, connect and build collective power have eroded. Decision‑making feels distant and transactional, something done to communities rather than with them, feeding a visceral distrust of politics and a sense of being written off or forgotten. As one Sunderland resident put it in a recent interview:

Everyone is just sick to their back teeth of politicians, especially in the north-east, in Sunderland. We are the forgot-about city.

What remains is a volatile mix of grief, anger and dislocation which can be channelled into divisive forms of populism, directing frustration at neighbours and newcomers rather than at the systems that produced these conditions.

Reactivating community-led change

And yet, as in the past, when systems are clearly failing, something in the region is stirring again. People across the North East are reactivating the region’s muscle memory of radical community-led change, and developing prototypes that show alternatives to our current economic model. They are asking deep questions about land and our relationship to it; about who owns the assets that matter and how that ownership is shared; about how capital and assets flow between people, households, businesses and places; and about the rules, regulations and laws that quietly decide who carries risk and whose futures get built.

They are also taking a critical view of wealth itself: not only how it is distributed, but how it is accumulated in the first place, and how extreme wealth and extreme poverty are bound together.

Out of those questions come the amazing prototypes they are building. Here we look at how the focus is shifting.

Spaces and assets

Across the region, spaces are being secured as long-term community infrastructure rather than speculative assets. Creative Factory in Middlesbrough has established a Creative Land Trust to anchor creative economies, developing 50,000 square feet of affordable studios, live-work apartments and event space for artists and makers, with surpluses reinvested in the creative sector. In Sacriston, the old Co-op building, once the heart of the village's cooperative movement, has been brought into community ownership and now houses Woodshed Workshop, a social enterprise providing woodworking training and employment skills to young people, demonstrating how the cooperative tradition can be remade in new forms.

Housing and land

Community land trusts and shared ownership models are taking housing out of the speculative market and placing it into community hands. For instance, Yorspace in York is building permanently affordable, low-carbon homes with land held in community ownership forever, ensuring they remain accessible for future generations rather than becoming assets for profit. In Sunderland, Back on the Map is buying and refurbishing empty and poorly managed homes so they can be let as good quality, affordable housing under community control, using housing regeneration as a way to strengthen the social and economic fabric of the neighbourhood and to keep the benefits of investment locked in locally.

Culture and imagination

Artists and organisers are using culture and materials to help people confront legacies of extraction and imagine different futures. Threads in the Ground, a climate hope organisation, explores the region's carbon heritage and climate debt through art, sculpture and immersive storytelling. No More Nowt works across County Durham's former coalfield communities, showing that culture is not a luxury but essential infrastructure for building collective identity, agency and the capacity to imagine and shape different futures (the ‘roses’ that make the ‘bread’ worth fighting for). In Horden, Ensemble '84 is a community-led, world-class theatre from a base in a former Methodist church in one of the county's most deprived communities, demonstrating that cultural wealth is as vital as material wealth in shaping thriving places.

Energy and legacy

The region that once powered the nation is once again asking who controls energy and who benefits from it. In Horden, the community is working to develop a minewater geothermal scheme, using naturally heated water from old coal mines to provide low-cost, low-carbon heat to local homes and businesses, turning industrial legacy into community-owned infrastructure and demonstrating that the transition to clean energy can be led from the very place that powered the first Industrial Revolution.

Solidarity and economic power

And in Durham, Redhills is rising again. It is launching a £5 million Solidarity Fund to provide non‑extractive, patient capital for co‑operatives and social enterprises to build a new solidarity economy across the Coalfield. JRF is supporting this work to show how communities can rebuild collective economic power on more resilient foundations, drawing on the lessons of the past while creating new forms of mutual aid and shared ownership that cannot be swept away when economic winds shift. The Solidarity Fund is designed to lock wealth and decision-making into community hands for the long term, rebuilding collective economic power on foundations that cannot be swept away when economic winds shift.

What is emerging is not a single blueprint, but a constellation of practical experiments that reawaken the region's radical spirit, illuminate what the next settlement could be and invite the state, institutions and investors to follow where people here are already leading. These efforts are under-resourced, fragmented and often working against the grain of dominant systems. Too much funding still focuses on ameliorating symptoms rather than tackling root causes; the deeper work of rewiring economies, redistributing power and rebuilding from below remains marginal to the mainstream.

Our regional programme exists to change that: to tend this reawakening, to strengthen the threads between these efforts, and to back the conditions in which this radical muscle memory can fully return, strong enough to reshape the systems that once constrained it — and, in time, to influence the rules of the game nationally.

JRF takes a different approach to place‑based work

JRF is taking a different approach to working in place through the regional team. For more than a century, JRF has researched and fought poverty, yet our annual poverty reports show hardship is still deepening across the North East. Despite the efforts of JRF and over 5,700 charities in England and Wales spending more than £8.1 billion each year, this hasn’t turned the dial on poverty.

Joseph Rowntree’s 1904 memorandum offers a clear blueprint for why, and how, we need to do things differently. He urged us to look beyond the visible symptoms of poverty and inequality and confront their underlying causes. The forces he named — concentrated wealth, unequal ownership and the political power that wealth confers — still shape the region today, and they are the ones our work now has to squarely face.

How Rowntree wanted to drive change wasn’t just through campaigning. His answer was to build practical alternatives that made different futures visible. The garden village of New Earswick, for example, showed what affordable housing and richer community life could look like, influencing models far beyond York.

So the work we’re doing is focusing on the ‘social evils’ as we see them today, by supporting prototypes showing how things can be different. The regional team is returning to our roots. Our working hypothesis is that, if today’s fragile but generative efforts are supported over the long term with the right support, they will deepen, connect and spread, shifting how power, wealth and opportunity flow in and through the region.

To do this, our work in the region focuses on 3 interconnected areas:

1. Backing proofs of possibility in place

Our aim is to invest in people and organisations building prototypes that show practical alternatives across the region: community stewardship of land and buildings, community‑led housing and energy, co‑operative and employee‑owned enterprises, regenerative funds and other models that root wealth, decision‑making and care in place. Examples of these ‘proofs of possibility’ are listed above.

Over the past year we have been listening to and learning from what is already growing. From that, a programme is taking shape to grow a network of ‘Northern Stewards’ — people rooted in communities and institutions who are holding work on housing, land, culture, ecology, wealth and community leadership, and who see the need for long‑term systemic change but often feel isolated and under‑supported. By investing in the relational fabric across the North and helping these stewards connect, learn and collaborate, we aim to nurture local ‘proofs of possibility’ that demonstrate, rather than simply describe, more just and regenerative futures.

2. Building the conditions and capacities for change

We work to strengthen the conditions that allow these alternatives to endure and multiply. This includes:

• community‑led democracy and alternative governance
• strong social infrastructure
• storytelling and narrative work
• community research and media
• imagination and grief practices
• anti‑racist and cross‑class solidarity
• land‑based work that reconnects people, ecology and place.

Examples of our current work across the region, building the conditions and capacities for change include:

• Wealth and epistemic justice: Through the Sea Change programme in Hartlepool, we are working with People’s Economy, Threads in the Ground and local community organisations to support community researchers to map how power, wealth and the economy work in the town. They’re surfacing stories, needs and ideas for alternatives, so that people in Hartlepool can name what’s happening on their own terms and begin to shape different economic futures.
• Alternative media: We’re working with Newcastle-based filmmaker Andrew Wilson to develop ‘We are our media’ a programme of community‑led media throughout the region, supporting people over time to develop a decentralised civic‑media network.
• Imagination practice: We’re working with Rob Hopkins across the summer to run immersive events and ‘How to Fall in Love with the Future’ training in Durham, Newcastle, Hartlepool and Middlesbrough, where communities can imagine fairer futures and prototype small steps towards them. Communities will learn practical tools for collective imagination and futures thinking, and seed‑funding will support communities to carry this work forward.
• Class solidarity, grief and hope: We're working with Larger Us to develop ‘Talking Shops’ in Hartlepool and Sunderland, transforming empty high street shops into shared spaces that support community dialogue. These hubs will invite people to share memories, voice concerns and explore what a ‘larger us’ might look like, one rooted in empathy, trust and shared purpose rather than the ‘them and us’ divisions that fuel discontent.
• Storytelling: We’re partnering with No More Nowt, Golden Sankofa and the Durham Local Authority Horden Together Partnership on ‘Horden is Class’, a project where residents reclaim Horden’s story on their own terms in a place too often written off by others. They will share memories, re‑tell local histories and create new stories rooted in working‑class life, strengthening pride and growing the collective capacity to imagine and build different futures from the ground up.

3. Acting as an anchor institution in and from place

Our aim is to connect JRF’s research, policy, communications, convening power and funding with the work of Northern Stewards and local partners. That means linking community‑led change with councils, anchor institutions and other wealth holders, and using what we learn in the region to inform wider debates about poverty, power and the economy. Work in place generates tangible examples that strengthen our ability to influence nationally; national shifts, in turn, help create better conditions for local progress.

As the only national foundation headquartered in the North of England, rooted in the city where Rowntree lived and worked, JRF has both proximity and responsibility: to build relationships, strengthen local capacity and contribute to the long‑term health of the places we are part of. We will lean into community wealth‑building approaches that root power, ownership and value in place. This is already shaping how we work through our role in the York and North Yorkshire Mayoral Commission on Community Wealth Building, which is helping embed practices that keep wealth, power and decision making rooted locally.

Our work will focus on shifting the underlying logics of the economy: who owns, who decides, what is valued and how finance flows. Our work aims to support the rewiring of the rules of the system, moving from extractive to regenerative, from concentrated ownership to shared stewardship, from short‑term returns to long‑term social and ecological value. JRF’s role is to back these different logics until they move from the margins into the mainstream. That means using our funding, convening, evidence and voice to grow institutions and infrastructures that keep wealth and decision making in community hands, support non‑extractive and community‑controlled finance, and centre care, culture, ecological repair and collective wellbeing alongside income.

This stance in the North East will shape how JRF shows up nationally. Our work in the region will support us to explore how we should invest and act, and the learning from it will inform how we use our influence to remove barriers, redirect resources and open space for more democratic, community‑owned and regenerative economic models, reshaping JRF itself and, over time, how national systems recognise, resource and sustain these forms of change.

In turn, this combination of regional practice and national influence is beginning to reshape JRF itself. In this sense, the regional programme is not separate from JRF’s policy and investment work, but a testing ground for it. The intention is that what is being built in the North East helps reshape how JRF thinks, invests and acts as an institution and, in turn, how national systems recognise, resource and sustain these forms of change.

How we work in place

How we work is as important as what we do. We’re a small team based in the North East, working in and with communities rather than at arm’s length. We live and work here, and we want this to feel like a team that turns up, listens and stays, not one that parachutes in or runs things from the top down.

We feel the urgency of people’s immediate pressures, and it grounds our work. We back practical alternatives and help rewire systems so they improve life now, while building the conditions for deeper, long-term change towards fairness, equity and ecological sustainability.

Our work is rooted in the specific histories and realities of the North East, it’s people and it’s land and sea. We reject extractive ways of working and build learning together in ways that benefit the region. We aim to be good collaborators, building relationships based on trust, care and accountability, aligning our goals and values with partners, and being open to change and to being changed through the work.

We are deeply invested in this region, as people and as an institution, and we care about what happens here. We use our resources, influence and platform with intent and care, sometimes stepping forward into power and sometimes stepping back to get out of the way. We’re prepared to take risks on ambitious, experimental work, and we invest in the relationships, networks and spaces that make long-term systemic change possible.

Over time, we want this work to be governed more collectively and held to account by the communities it serves, shifting how power, wealth and opportunity flow in and through the region. That means centring equity, using participatory and decolonial approaches, recognising the rights of both people and nature, and continually examining and changing our own practice. We also make space for joy, creativity, humour and hope, because they are vital to sustaining the work and imagining different futures together.

Back to our roots, on to our future

This work is just beginning, and we need people to help build it. We have a number of job opportunities live now and more opportunities opening soon. Over the coming months, we'll be communicating much more about what's happening across the North East, sharing stories of the people and organisations building alternatives, amplifying voices that are often overlooked, and creating space for conversation about what just and regenerative futures actually look like in practice.

If this work speaks to you, we want to gather fellow travellers around it, people committed to building just and regenerative futures in the North East. Follow JRF's regional programme updates to stay connected.

The North East is a place where working‑class communities have imagined and built toward something better, opening up new possibilities, creating institutions, rights and cultures that changed the terms of life here. Our regional programme steps directly into that tradition: backing people who are already building more just and regenerative futures, and helping create the conditions for that radical muscle memory to return at full strength and remake the systems around it. With JRF’s resources, influence and long‑term commitment behind this growing ecosystem of practice, the North East can once again be a place that sets the terms of the next settlement — deciding how power, wealth and possibility flow, and in whose interests.

Acknowledgements

Huge thanks go to the many people who shaped this work. This includes, JRF colleagues especially Sophia Parker, Darren Leighton, Kate McLaven and consultant Anna Spencer, and to JRF Trustees for their enthusiastic commitment to work in the region. To friends at Redhills, especially Andrew McIntyre, Rachael Lennon and Nick Malyan (now Sunderland Culture) for support and solidarity. To Sarah Kerr and Ruth Taylor for ongoing support and encouragement. To Adam Cooper, Jonah Earle, Alex Evans, Claire Brown, Gemma Rowe and Ali Turner who’ve been instrumental in the development of the work. Thanks to the writers who have shaped my understanding: Huw Beynon, whose book ‘Masters and Servants’ remains essential reading on mining history; Sacha Hilhorst; and Matt James Smith.

Finally, a personal acknowledgement to my granddad Jim Hughes, whose legacy continues to shape this work, my hope for the North East and my desire to be a good ancestor.