Supporting just and regenerative futures in the North East

A note from the author, Victoria Hughes

I have written this piece from a dual vantage point: as a steward of JRF’s work in the region, and as someone born and brought up in the North East, with my own perspectives and experiences. I offer it as one story about the context for the work we are supporting. I care deeply about this region, and I feel an ancestral pull from those who came before and those who will come after to play my part in supporting its future. That is why I draw on my own heritage to tell the story of the miners, the institutions they built, what was built and lost in the place I grew up in. At the same time, I know mine is only one voice and perspective in a vast sea of stories still to be told about and by people in the North East. As our work progresses, we will hold ourselves to account for seeking out those stories and sharing them from the perspectives of those who have inherited, lived and breathed the region’s narratives of change, struggle, joy and hope.

The past we inherit

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 chose to not accept the world as it was, and decided to use their collective agency to build something better. 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 building prototypes and using our resources to support the conditions for this work to grow. 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 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.

Working people didn't simply endure these extractive systems, they imagined and built alternatives. Nowhere clearer than in the coalfield communities of County Durham. Here, miners and their families confronted an economy of poverty, poor housing and ill health. What they achieved was extraordinary.

By pooling wages and small contributions from thousands of households, they created vast systems of mutual support. At the heart 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 their communities' future, learning how to organise, build power and use it for the common good.

Mining communities weren't passive. They became highly effective at capturing and redistributing value. Through wages, collective bargaining, and political organisation, miners used their leverage to reshape economic and political power. In an act of collective audacity, they secured the Miners' Welfare Fund: a wealth tax on mineowners. Every ton of coal carried a levy raising the equivalent of tens of millions of pounds yearly, funding halls, public baths, libraries and welfare across the coalfields. Around 80% was democratically allocated by community-run welfare committees.

What emerged was a self-made welfare state: rooted in place, collectively governed, materially expressed in land, buildings, and shared assets. Coalfield communities established hospitals and medical provision, built homes for older miners, provided sickness and unemployment support in crisis. They invested in education as shared power embedded in everyday life. Miners' institutes, libraries, reading rooms and members' clubs weren't just amenities: they were civic schools, where identity was forged, solidarity deepened and collective capability grew.

Communities also built rich cultural and social infrastructure grounded in the belief that a good life required 'bread and roses'. In the midst of gruelling conditions (including the unpaid labour of women who sustained families and communities), they carved out spaces for joy, creativity and connection. Out of modest wages, families sustained brass bands, theatre, art, and sport, insisting culture and play weren't luxuries but essentials. Welfare halls and libraries became civic commons where people made sense of the world together. Here, they were not only workers, but citizens: rooted in place, creating and sharing culture, experiencing dignity, imagination and joy that made life more than survival.

These achievements came from organised power, democratic control, and determination to turn an extractive economy's proceeds into collective flourishing.

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 live with the aftershocks of rapid deindustrialisation, compounded by decades of underinvestment and austerity. This wasn't some form of natural 'post-industrial' transition. It was the outcome of political choices that closed industries, dismantled institutions, and stripped power from the places that had built it.

The consequences of these choices are stark. 1 in 4 people in the North East lives in poverty, including 1 in 3 children. Life expectancy is 4 years lower than in the South. The region has the highest suicide rate in England (almost double London’s rate) and the lowest average wages in the country. 

The parallel exploitation and extraction of people and places 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 has inherited climate debt from past heavy industry while also adopting new AI infrastructure that brings its own significant environmental impacts.

The social spaces and infrastructure that supported communities to come together, connect and build collective power have eroded. 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.

If we look back to the Durham coalfield, we see that the miners' hard-won gains have been eroded. What happened exposes a structural vulnerability in the foundations of the systems they built, one that matters if we are to build strong foundations for fairer futures. The infrastructures miners created were impressive, but they depended on a flow of resources they didn't control. When that tap of financial resources was turned off through deindustrialisation, the consequences were devastating. Looking at what endures, like Horden’s welfare park, still described as the village’s ‘jewel in the crown’, we see that it is the assets communities fully owned that survived, safeguarded in their hands, the statue of ‘Marra’ depicts what was lost.

But this is not a story of loss, far from it. The story of this region is one of pride, hope, and a reawakening of imagination, as extraordinary people once again create alternatives and build better futures, just as generations before them did. Before we move forward, though, it’s worth pausing to sit with the past and understand the lessons it has to offer.

What this history teaches us

Looking back, one lesson stands out. Ownership alone isn't enough. Communities can hold assets, but without controlling capital, assets cannot sustain themselves. Democratic institutions can exist, but without an independent economic base, their power is fragile.

Three shifts are essential, shaping what's emerging today:

1. Communities need enduring democratic control. They must own land and assets, with community-led institutions governing them long term, not contingent on a single industry or fragile political settlement.
2. Capital must be rooted and regenerative. The coalfield lesson isn't that the tap was turned off: it's that communities didn't control it. A just transition requires systems where capital anchors in place, recirculates locally, and cannot be withdrawn by distant decisions.
3. The future cannot replicate extractive logic. We live with environmental and climate debt passed down across generations. Any new economic settlement must be socially just and ecologically regenerative, creating livelihoods that sustain people and restore places, not deplete them.

We believe that the task isn't to recreate what was lost, but carry forward its lesson: when people have power, resources and democratic control, they can build institutions transforming everyday life. That thread runs from the region's past into what's emerging now.

Reactivating community-led change

As in the past, when systems were failing, communities are responding. People are reactivating the region's muscle memory of radical community-led change, developing prototypes showing alternatives. What connects this work isn't nostalgia: it's a practical effort to answer unresolved questions: who owns, who decides, how wealth flows, what futures are possible here. They ask deep questions about land and our relationship to it; who owns the assets that matter and how ownership is shared; how capital flows between people, households, businesses and places; the rules deciding who carries risk and whose futures get built. They question wealth itself: how it's distributed, how it's accumulated, and how extreme wealth and poverty are bound together.

Out of those questions come practical experiments rooting ownership, decision making, culture and care back in place. Some of the alternatives we see being built focus on:

• Spaces and assets. Addressing the need for enduring control over assets shaping everyday life, spaces are being secured as long-term community infrastructure not speculative assets. Creative Factory in Middlesbrough established a Creative Land Trust anchoring creative economies, developing 50,000 square feet of affordable studios, live-work apartments and event space with surpluses reinvested. In Sacriston, the old Co-op building is now community-owned, housing Woodshed Workshop, a social enterprise training young people, showing how the cooperative tradition is remade in new forms.
• Housing and land. Community land trusts and shared ownership models take housing from the speculative market into community hands. Yorspace in York builds permanently affordable, low-carbon homes with land in community ownership forever, ensuring future accessibility not profit. In Sunderland, Back on the Map buys and refurbishes empty homes for good quality, affordable housing under community control, strengthening the neighbourhood's social and economic fabric and locking investment locally.
• Culture and imagination. Artists and organisers use culture to help people confront extraction legacies and imagine different futures. Threads in the Ground explores the region's carbon heritage and climate debt through art, sculpture and storytelling. No More Nowt shows culture is essential infrastructure for building collective identity, agency and capacity to imagine and shape different futures (the 'roses' making the 'bread' worth fighting for). In Horden, Ensemble '84 is a community-led, world-class theatre in a former Methodist church in one of the county's most deprived communities, demonstrating cultural wealth is as vital as material wealth.
• Energy and legacy. The region that powered the nation again asks who controls energy and who benefits. In Horden, the community develops a minewater geothermal scheme, using heated water from old coal mines for low-cost, low-carbon heat to local homes and businesses, turning industrial legacy into community-owned infrastructure and showing that clean energy transition can be led from the place that powered the first Industrial Revolution.
• Solidarity and economic power. Directly addressing the need to control capital flows, Redhills is rising again and launching a £5 million Solidarity Fund providing non-extractive, patient capital for co-operatives and social enterprises building a new solidarity economy across the Coalfield. JRF supports this to show how communities rebuild collective economic power on resilient foundations, drawing on past lessons while creating new mutual aid and shared ownership that can't be swept away. The Solidarity Fund locks wealth and decision making in community hands long term.

What's emerging across the region isn't a single blueprint, but a constellation of experiments reawakening the region's radical spirit, illuminating what the next settlement could be and inviting the state, institutions and investors to follow. These efforts are under-resourced, fragmented and working against dominant systems. Too much funding ameliorates symptoms not root causes; the deeper work of rewiring economies, redistributing power and rebuilding from below remains marginal.

The work we’re developing in JRF’s regional team aims to stand alongside this constellation of experiments, helping them to endure and grow. We want to work with other institutions, funders and partners to resource this reawakening, strengthen the threads between efforts, and back the conditions for this radical muscle memory to reshape constraining systems and influence national rules. We want to develop this work with people in the region through a programme we’re calling ‘Northern Stewards’, co‑designing ways to connect, support and strengthen those already tending to just and regenerative futures here.

We want to build the conditions for change

Alongside backing those already creating alternatives, we also want to deepen the conditions, capacities and capabilities that allow this work to take root, grow and thrive. Together with communities, we’ve been exploring what feels most needed to make that possible. These are some of the strands of work we are beginning to support across the region:

• Community-led democracy: We’re supporting Redhills to reimagine the Pitmen’s Parliament as a community-led parliament where people debate, organise and build the alternatives needed to meet the challenges of today.
• Wealth and epistemic justice: Through Sea Change in Hartlepool, we are democratising knowledge creation, supporting community researchers with People's Economy, Threads in the Ground and local organisations to map how power, wealth and the economy work  and to use that knowledge to imagine and shape different economic futures.
• Storytelling, community-led media and narrative work: We’re partnering with No More Nowt, Golden Sankofa on 'Horden is Class', supporting residents to reclaim Horden's story, in a place often written off by others. We’re developing ‘We are our media’ with Andrew Wilson, challenging the concentration of media power and wealth, and creating space for people to tell their own stories and shape how their communities are seen.
• Imagination and grief practices: We're running a series of imagination events this summer in Durham, Newcastle and Hartlepool with Rob Hopkins and exploring grief practices in the region with Dead Good.
• Anti-racist and cross-class solidarity: We're working with Larger Us to develop 'Talking Shops', transforming empty shops into spaces for people to share memories, voice concerns and explore a 'larger us' rooted in empathy, trust and shared purpose not 'them and us' divisions.
• Social infrastructure and education: We’re exploring how to build on the region’s strong tradition of community education to grow the capabilities needed to lead change today.
• Reconnecting with nature: We’re stewarding a Rowntree asset, Homestead Park, as a place to grow the conditions for just and regenerative futures. Last summer we ran Homestead Park Festival — Here is Hope, inviting thousands of people to step into the kind of joyful, fair and sustainable future we want to help build together.

JRF takes a different approach to place‑based work

JRF is taking a different approach to working in place through our work in 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 helps explain why: he urged us to look beyond the visible symptoms of poverty to the underlying forces of concentrated wealth, unequal ownership and the political power that wealth confers. Those forces still shape the region today, so our regional work is focused on confronting them directly and supporting practical alternatives that show how things can be different.

As the only national foundation headquartered in the North of England, rooted where Rowntree lived and worked, we have both proximity and responsibility to the Region. We are strengthening our role as an anchor institution: building relationships, strengthening local capacity and contributing to the long‑term health of our places. Our aim is to help shift the underlying economic logics of the region: who owns, who decides, what is valued and how finance flows. We lean into community wealth‑building, rooting power, ownership and value in place and helping to embed practices that keep wealth, power and decision‑making local.

We’re really excited to explore how our work in the North East can start to inform and shape JRF’s broader policy, communications and investment work. Our hope is that what happens in the region will help reshape how JRF thinks, invests and acts as an institution, and, in turn, how national systems recognise, resource and sustain these forms of change and create better local conditions.

How we work matters as much as what we do. We are a small team based in the North East, living and working here. We aim to be a team that turns up, listens and stays, not one that parachutes in or runs things top‑down. We want to continue to be honest about the intent and focus of our work, which is to support those building alternatives and the conditions for this work to grow, rather than focusing on improving the symptoms of systems that are failing us.

Our approach is rooted in the North East’s specific histories and realities. We reject extractive ways of working and try to build learning that benefits the region, collaborating on the basis of trust, care and accountability and being open to change ourselves through the work.

We care deeply about this region, as people and as an institution. We use our resources, influence and platform with intent, sometimes stepping forward into power, sometimes stepping back to make space for others. We are prepared to take risks on ambitious, experimental work, and to invest in the relationships, networks and spaces that make long‑term change possible. Over time, we want this work to be governed collectively and held to account by the communities it serves, centring equity, participatory and decolonial approaches, and the rights of people and nature. We also want to make space for joy, creativity, humour and hope as essential to sustaining the work.

Back to our roots, on to our future

This work is just beginning. We need people to build it. We have job opportunities live now and more opportunities opening soon. We'll communicate much more about what's happening across the North East, sharing stories of people and organisations building alternatives, amplifying underheard voices, and creating conversation space about what just and regenerative futures look like in practice.

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

The North East is where working-class communities imagined and built toward something better, opening new possibilities, creating institutions, rights and cultures that changed life's terms here. Our regional programme steps into that tradition: backing people already building just and regenerative futures, and creating conditions for radical muscle memory to return at full strength and remake systems. With JRF's resources, influence and long-term commitment behind this ecosystem, the North East can again set the next settlement's terms, deciding how power, wealth and possibility flow, who controls them, and in whose interests, this time on foundations designed to endure. We want to work with partners and communities across the region to support a next chapter that is rooted in fairness, alive with hope and rich in possibility.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to all who shaped this work: JRF colleagues and collaborators, especially Sophia Parker, Darren Leighton, Kate McLaven, Anna Spencer, Sarah Kerr and Ruth Taylor, and JRF Trustees for their enthusiastic commitment. To Redhills friends, Andrew McIntyre, Rachael Lennon and Nick Malyan (now Sunderland Culture) for support and solidarity. To Adam Cooper, Jonah Earle, Alex Evans, Claire Brown, Gemma Rowe and Ali Turner who've been instrumental. Thanks to writers shaping my understanding: Huw Beynon, Sacha Hilhorst; and Matt James Smith.

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