In one of our recent Living Places Network sessions, we heard from Jess from People’s Economy and Darren from Joseph Rowntree Foundation about the ambitious, grounded, and deeply relational work unfolding in Hartlepool and the slate valleys of North Wales.
These are not your typical economic development projects. They are long-term, place-based experiments in community research, power-building, and imaginative action. They’re working with questions, not answers. And they’re placing trust in ordinary people to lead systems change from the ground up.
Introducing the Sea Change Project
Darren, who holds the role of Local Lead for Hartlepool with JRF’s Emerging Futures team, shared the roots of Sea Change - a five-year programme designed to enable communities to lead their own transitions towards fairer, more equitable futures.
In Hartlepool, years of funded community work made a huge difference - but a small dent in the bigger picture. Poverty and ecological decline continued. People were exhausted. Sea Change was born from the recognition that it’s time to move beyond crisis response and start working with communities to change the systems beneath it all.
Rather than rushing to solutions or top-down fixes, the project is moving in slow, iterative waves. It’s inviting a small group of community partners to recruit local researchers, who will investigate and interpret the workings of the economy in Hartlepool - how it shows up in everyday life, what needs to change, and what might be possible if power, wealth and knowledge were shared more fairly.
Why Community Research?
Jess, Senior Programme Manager in Wales with People’s Economy, offered a powerful reflection on why this method matters.
Community research, as she described it, isn’t extractive. It’s not about surveying or studying communities from the outside. It’s about supporting people to ask their own questions, interpret their own findings, and act on what matters to them.
It’s embedded, relational, and action-oriented.
In North Wales, she’s supporting over 20 community researchers across several former slate-mining towns. The work there has already begun to reshape how residents understand tourism, housing, and the economy - and how they want to intervene. Local researchers have held stakeholder events, co-designed policy recommendations, and even begun mapping out alternatives to venture-capital-led regeneration.
What makes this possible isn’t just the method. It’s the culture of trust and experimentation that’s being built - alongside anchor organisations, researchers, and academics - through slow, deliberate relationship-building.
Moving at the Speed of Trust
One of the most compelling aspects of both projects is their pace and ethos.
This is not “consultation.” It’s not a glossy strategy exercise. It’s a messy, evolving journey toward co-creation. It requires scaffolding but also spaciousness. There are boundaries, but also flexibility to let communities lead.
As Jess put it, the real magic happens in the space between design and emergence. It’s about giving people the confidence, support and relationships they need to move from asking questions to creating change, and to do so in ways that are embedded in place, not parachuted in from above.
In Wales, researchers are now designing their own questions and methodologies. In Hartlepool, new narratives are forming, ones that remember the region’s industrial power, but imagine something very different for the future. Something based not on extraction and competition, but on collective agency, wellbeing, and repair.
What If Research Was the Start of a Transition?
This session sparked rich reflections from across the Living Places Network. Emma, from Devon, noted how community research echoes a kind of embedded citizens’ assembly, something ongoing, alive, and shaped by those involved. Phil reflected on narrative and story: that real transition depends not just on facts or funding, but on a shared sense of direction. Where are we going? Who gets to decide?
Both projects suggest that these questions can be held collectively, and that when they are, something shifts. People begin to feel not just heard, but needed. Not just consulted, but responsible. The power begins to redistribute.
From Reflection to Infrastructure: What Communities Really Need
What these projects also surface is something that often goes unsaid: communities don’t need to be told we need system change. They don’t need more campaigns urging behaviour shifts, or louder calls for action from above. They already know things need to change, many have been living with the consequences of broken systems for decades. The real question is: what makes it possible to act?
Too often, public discourse frames change as an individual mindset shift or a matter of willpower; if only people cared more, shouted louder, voted differently. But this misses the deeper truth: we live in a society that actively makes collective action difficult. The conditions aren’t set up for people to step into power in place. Action doesn’t happen in a vacuum - it needs infrastructure, care, and containers to hold it.
That’s why this work matters. It isn’t just about advocacy. It’s about building the scaffolding. Creating the conditions. Holding the space. Organisations of the future need to do more of this legwork, not directing change, but making it possible. That means embedding for the long term, putting down roots, and being in right relationship with place. It also means de-centring themselves from the story, just as JRF and People’s Economy are doing here, so that communities can genuinely lead.
What’s emerging in Hartlepool and Gwynedd isn’t just a shift in narrative or method. It’s a different organising logic altogether. One that says: we don’t need to change people’s minds, we need to work together to change the systems that make action feel impossible.
A Model for More Than One Place
Sea Change and the Dolennu research network in Gwynedd aren’t isolated experiments. They’re prototypes, living examples of how we might reimagine place-based change not as a service to deliver, but as a process to steward.
What’s emerging is a different kind of infrastructure. One made not of buildings or funding streams, but of relationships, confidence, and shared practice.
And it’s a model we believe has relevance far beyond Wales or the North East. As more communities confront the overlapping crises of economy, ecology, and belonging, this way of working offers a path, rooted in relationship, led by the people, and paced by what’s possible.
💬 Want to be part of this conversation?
The Living Places Network is open to practitioners exploring community-led transitions in place. We hold regular knowledge sharing calls like this one—and we’re building infrastructure to support deeper peer learning across the UK.
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💡 And if you’re experimenting with similar work in your place, we’d love to hear from you.