Member

In the 1990s, through the common purpose programme, we started to work with the business community—originally with the manager of the Tesco, across the road. One reason for that is that we found them to be honest, reliable and consistent, and not subject to this kind of churn. We began to develop what has become known as the social enterprise movement and to put a business logic behind this work. When it came to involving residents, we began to realise that it is very easy to sit on a representative committee and say you represent the community and then blame the council, the councillors and everyone else—anyone can do that. We began to ask whether they were going to work with us on building a housing company to take over some of the housing in Poplar and build a proper social business model that would start to connect housing, education, health and place-making. It is through doing stuff that you learn, rather than through complaining and chattering about stuff. We started to build Poplar HARCA.