Uncomfortable truths: learning from Self-Reliant Groups
She, a woman with quiet strength and staying in an unfamiliar community. 3 kids and another on the way. Illness in the family. No job, money or friends. Life suddenly feeling out of control and taking her on a path, without choice, or even imagined. Gets introduced to women who are doing this thing called ‘Self-Reliant Groups’ (SRGs). She enjoys the instant connect and makes new friends. A spark is ignited, to create something. Her first group burns out but a second forms from the embers of the first. Struggles continue but the spark is a now a smouldering fire. She was always a great mum and now she is an unexpected entrepreneur.
In her own words: “SRGs was a way to gain friends, maybe get out a bit more, be more social and happy but it has ended up being so much more than that. We have all grown in confidence, gained friends for life and new support networks for the future. Our families have benefited from having mums/wives who are happier, more fulfilled. Our children are learning how important it is to make your own way in life through seeing their mums producing and selling their own items.”
Progress is messy. That doesn’t bother the women. They know about mess, about the real world of family and business. But for the experts and professionals who like puritanical certainty and clean outcomes, it’s a guaranteed recipe for sleepless nights. SRGs are more than just about a new approach or a model; they are human beings – regardless of circumstances and backgrounds. People like us. Not just ‘nice’ and ‘capable’ but ready to change the world. They are, in every sense, our equals.
And as equals, they are taking control of their lives both in the public and private domains.
How does it work? SRGs are informal groups of people – mostly women – who come together to save small amounts of money, support each other, learn new skills and go on to become unexpected entrepreneurs. In the process, they make life better for themselves and each other. Alongside their industry and economic output, SRGs, through their inner workings, churn out products like trust, healthy relationships and resourcefulness for the fragile socio-economic fabric around them.
Wait. Is it that simple? It is. The idea is not rocket science. SRGs are simply a space to support people’s deepest yearnings: for connection, for purpose and for identity.
Too often, we, their equals in the poverty industry, get in the way. Women in SRGs must unlearn and rebuild the public narratives: weak and vulnerable, dependent. The shift starts within themselves: from consumers and beneficiaries to producers of monetary and social value. The women explain their own development in the following terms: She starts feeling worthy (I/We are worth it). She goes on to recovering agency (I/We have purpose). She continues with an expanded cognitive bandwidth (I/We can do this and more). The pace of this movement is determined by the individual and the group. They are in control.
There are currently some 135 SRGs in the UK and the Netherlands bound together in a movement, persistently acting on their new-found agency.
What do they tell us about the future of public policy? Three points:
1. Focus on the context around the women and the getting out of the way. The SRGs belong to the women. They are not part of a timebound intervention or project designed, delivered and funded by others. If a woman is facing challenges, she turns to others in her group. She turns to her group to look out for her daughter when she was struggling at school. She went to her group for a loan to deal with an emergency, and not a loan shark. The women figure this stuff out for themselves. An SRG creates the context in which agency can flourish and it leaves it to the women. Someone wisely said to me once: “The biggest gift you can give to your people is to walk backwards from them”. There is something very profound in doing that because it starts stripping away power from the ‘messiah’ in us.
2. Do not separate the social and the economic; one is the other. We connect and we create/produce – that is the human landscape, even for those who live on the margins and/or have exceptionally difficult life experiences. The third sector and the government serially fail at this. We neatly organise community empowerment, community regeneration and community enterprise (or social enterprise) into separate compartments. The division suits us. The Western psyche loves to ‘specialise’ our offerings. It matters to us but it doesn’t matter to the women. Ask them.
3. Cede power. Let me give one example, the control over data, a fault line in our work. Most data are collected from service users to help organisations prove the effectiveness of their work to commissioners and funders. Reverse this formula. SRGs are now working to own their own data, decide on what data are collected and how those data are used. Suddenly, the primary function of the data is to provide feedback to SRG members and SRG groups as a whole. A difficult journey, one that makes us nervous and excited.
If you are interested in knowing the practicalities of doing SRGs, you can go to www.srgmovement.com and/or there are some learning notes here: https://welearn.ratio.org.uk/tag/women-in-control-of-their-lives/.
Noel Mathias is the Founder and Managing Director of WEvolution and is responsible for introducing the Self-Reliant Groups (SRGs) to the UK. He is originally from India and holds degrees in History, Philosophy and Theology. He completed his Masters in Communication at the Westminster University in London in 2006 and has lived in Scotland since then.
