About us
Last Updated on Sunday, 21 November 2010 16:38
Next to Nowhere is a radical social centre built and run by activists from the Merseyside area. Located on Bold Street beneath News From Nowhere bookshop in Liverpool city centre, we have a vegan kitchen space, a vegan cafe open on Saturday afternoons, free-to-use computers and wi-fi, a library of radical books, we hold film nights, activist meetings & other events, and offer space for other groups to hold meetings and events.
We welcome anyone who shares our goals to get involved, by joining in with the work of running the centre, by supporting us with donations of money or materials, or by using the space for your events and meetings
Who we are
The social centre is run by the collective of volunteers, who organise via our email lists and our monthly meeting held in the centre at 7.30pm on the fourth Tuesday of every month.
The centre opened in September 2007, and it came about thanks to the ideas and efforts of a diverse group of activists who came together under the umbrella of Liverpool Social Forum - a regular meeting for local activists. Then and now social centre volunteers come from a range of backgrounds: community activism, animal rights, anti-war, climate-change, feminism, anarchism and more. We don't agree about everything, nor do we need to, but what unites us is a shared desire for:
'a fair, free and sustainable society - without hierarchy, discrimination or the exploitation of people, animals and the planet for profit.'
Creating the social centre as an autonomous, non-hierarchical, do-it-yourself space is part of trying to realise this. We don't claim to or seek to represent anyone. Instead we look to provide resources for people to work for themselves, to increase their own self-confidence and to improve their own lives.
Here is an article about how the social centre came about, that appeared in Nerve magazine.
What we do
The volunteers collectively run every aspect of the social centre. This means everything from doing the accounts to cleaning the toilets, running the cafe and doing the cooking, to maintaining the computers and even this website. We also organise events in the centre, in part to raise money to cover our running costs, but mostly and more importantly we do this, and all the work of running the centre, in order to raise awareness of the activist campaigns and issues that we are variously involved in, and to ultimately help work towards a fairer and more sustainable world.
We'll always welcome more help and new ideas.
How we work
The running of the centre is based on principles of mutual aid and solidarity. Without the fancy words this means we aim to look after and respect each other, whatever our differences. We work non-hierarchically and co-operatively: without leaders and without anyone telling anyone else what they have to do. We all have our own opinions and people may disagree passionately about some things, but we want everyone's opinion to respected and heard and all our decisions will try to take into account everybody's needs as far as that is possible.
To this end we use consensus decision making at our meetings. Consensus is a decision making system that solicits the views of all present and moves through a series of proposals that are modified until a decision agreeable to everyone is reached. Here is some more information, from the Seeds For Change website, about consensus. (We keep things simple, and don't generally use hand signals or other advanced features of consensus decision-making that some groups use).
At meetings we have someone volunteer to be the facilitator for the meeting - to run the meeting, keep items to time and to make sure that people have chance to speak - and someone volunteer to take minutes of the meeting and to circulate those minutes to our email list afterwards. We encourage everyone to take a turn at these responsibilities. (The Seeds For Change website has lots of useful information and advices about facilitating, taking minutes, and other aspects of organising meetings)
We will often get to together as smaller groups within the collective to work on particular tasks. For example, the cafe volunteers meet regularly once a month (the first Tuesday of the month at 7pm, before the Merseyside Animal Rights meeting) and organise to run the cafe more or less independently as a group within the collective. Or volunteers may get together to work on drafting a policy for example, that will then be presented for discussion and consideration at the collective monthly meeting.
Individuals choose their own level of involvement. Some people take on work as and when it's needed, whereas others might concentrate on one area they enjoy or have particular skills for. We ask everyone to help with the general tasks of cleaning and tidying - simply tidying up after you've used the space and washing up your coffee cups and so on is just as important as being able to cook a great meal or put up shelves! You can give as much or as little time as you want and are able to. The power of working collectively is that by pooling our strengths and abilities, supporting each other, and sharing tasks and responsibilities, we can achieve so much more together than we can as individuals.
Why we do it
As should be clear by now running the social centre is a hell of a lot of work. Why, you might ask, spend time cooking and cleaning rather than devoting time to any of the hundreds of issues that cry out for attention, from climate change to social housing, the Iraq war to hospital closures? As it happens, many of us as individuals, in different groups are also working on these and other problems. All of us, however, are convinced that tackling this or that issue is not enough. The whole system of capitalism is rotten and needs to be destroyed and replaced with something better before it destroys us all.
We feel that the social centre is one small, step towards a different world without the exploitation of the many by the few. We feel that the centre can contribute towards a culture of resistance amongst ordinary people by providing space and the facilities to organise for ourselves and by providing the opportunity to practice organising without hierarchy or coercion. We are one among many other social centres nationally national social centre network and social centres are an international phenomenon which is tied to resistance worldwide.
Modern social centres are part of tradition which stretches back through, amongst other things;
- working men's clubs in the UK which were part of a militant labour movement,
- occupied social centres in Italy which came out of the rent strikes, factory and apartment occupations and mass demonstrations of the Hot Autumn of 1969,
- the Solidaridad Obreras set up before and during the Spanish revolution of 1936 by anarchists and syndicalists,
- the meeting halls of the IWW crucial in organising the most militant union the US has ever seen,
and many other examples of radical independent spaces organised by movements for social change.
Next to Nowhere is a small part of something much bigger. By taking part in it we hope to be part of real social change that will make a difference to all our lives.