In 2011, I found myself in a Birmingham Convent at the board meeting of Citizens UK, the community organising body that pioneered the Living Wage.
With the director Penny Woolcock, we’d been trying to get a film off the ground about two gangs in Birmingham who had been killing each other for years. Finding funding was difficult. We didn’t have a method for reconciling the two groups.
Community organising comes to the rescue
Citizens UK provided a set of contacts in Birmingham who gave us seed money. Citizens provided training which members of both gangs undertook and helped them create relationships which eventually led to a truce, brought about by the film One Mile Away.
