Your Guild Needs YOU. 5 Day’s Left to Join or Support Via Our Crowdfunder!

Our Chief Executive Talks About Her Experience of Community Organising at the Guild, Where it has Come from, and Why we Urgently Need more Organisers!

Why are we crowdfunding?

Our Community Organising approach secured an ongoing working relationship with the Mayor of London. Through a meeting with Guild leaders Sabeha Mia of Juta Shoes, Maher, Anjum of  Oitij-jo Collective, Dee O’Connell of The Broke Down Palace, and Robyn Simms from Square Root Soda at Spitalfields Farm two weeks ago the Mayor agreed to work with us on our Commercial Rent Manifesto. Since the pandemic struck there are now so many more strands to our work, we desperately need another Organiser to help make it all happen.  

In recognition of the hardship faced by small businesses, freelancers, and social enterprises we are offering a ‘pay what you can’ way to join the Guild if you join via our crowdfunder’  before 17th May. See the full list of existing members, partners, and supporters at the end of this blog.  

OUR CROWDFUNDER ENDS IN 5 DAYS, DON’T MISS OUT JOIN OR SUPPORT TODAY:  https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/fair-rents-for-small-businesses

Growing a  powerful voice for effective action on members’ common issues is an important reason to join or support the Guild.  Membership also gives small businesses a supportive peer-led community for added capacity and resilience as we recover together. 

Need more reasons to join? Here’s seven;

• KICKSTART JOB PLACEMENTS we are a Government Kickstart Gateway saving you paperwork on applications and supporting with training providers we process your new fully funded job placement, helping young people at risk of long term unemployment back into work
• BLACK POUND DAY increasing visibility of our Black members
• GUILD MARKETS events at Old Spitalfields Market
• MEMBER EVENTS gatherings for peer-to-peer solidarity, enabling members to connect, share information and help each other through trading collaboration and mutual support
• RENTCHECK with your help will be launched in June this year and will be essential to anchor rents at the low end of the market
• ACCESS TO OUR LEGAL FUND for members who need it most when the moratorium ends in June
• EAST END TRADES GUILD STORE where our members can sell their goods and services

My Community Organising Story

Counting the votes for the priority issues of founder members of the Guild in 2011. Rents, business rates then planning were the top three voted on. Philip Pittak – Crescent Trading, Francesca Abimbola – Franceskka Fabrics, Leila McAlister – Leila’s Shop, and previous CUK Director Niel Jameson. Photograph by Sarah Ainslie.

I have been Organising for the EETG since 2010. I was called to the craft through my Dad Paul Nicolson an ex champagne salesman turned Vicar who ran his campaign group Tax Payers Against Poverty from his home in Tottenham for 19 years prior to his death last year. He said to me “You should be an organiser darling, you would be good at it” I didn’t need more encouragement. Yesterday he would have turned 89.

Dad commissioned the Minimum Income Standards research from the Family Budget Unit in 1999 which was used by UNISON and London Citizens to persuade Ken Livingstone, as Mayor of London, to introduce the London Living Wage.

Shortly after the career advice, I got myself on to a master’s program in Community Organising at Queen Mary University and ran the Sussex Marathon to help pay for my fees. It was grueling getting myself through training and working full time while studying as a single parent in London. I had to be incredibly disciplined but even then debt was inevitable, I simply could not manage the rent and the bills in London for two.

After two years of hard graft, I came away with a Master of Arts Degree. My family came to support me at my Graduation. My son Marley on the left. My brother Rod, Sister Claire and my Dad. I wear tartan dedicated to my Scottish Mum Robina Dallmeyer.

It was while I was studying, that I first went to visit Paul Gardner at Gardners’ after reading about him in Spitalfields Life. Together with The Gentle Author, Paul Gardner, and many of his comrades, we uncovered the common issues to affect small businesses in the neighbourhood. We held our launch assembly at Christchuch Spitalfields in November 2012 and we have been working together ever since. 

Everyone who attended remembers this launch assembly with great fondness, the founding members made it a glorious event.

Community Organising is joyous and tremendously rewarding but like anything worthwhile, to do it properly takes time and is extremely challenging. A vast amount of patience, skill, training, and learning on the job is required. Sadly it is massively undervalued, sometimes misunderstood, and often invisible.  Much of my own labour over the last decade has been voluntary or low-waged. I have doggedly kept at it for so long because I believe in the craft just like my Dad did.

Organising is pragmatic, there is no ideology, action is rooted in the common interests of a diverse group of people, not in dogma. It has been explicitly developed to grow power for the common good, putting local people center stage to own and lead the solutions to the problems they face.

The first time Sadiq met with us in 2016, he came for Breakfast at E. Pellicci. We take him to all the best places! Here he is with Anna, Nevio and Maria Pellicci and ex-boxer Warren Richards from Cafe Caribbean. 

The approach has its roots in the civil rights movement and has been developed in this country by many organisations including our partners Citizens UK who breathed life into Dad’s research for the Living Wage with East London members of TELCO in the 90’s. Citizens UK works with institutions of faith, labour, and education. In an age of declining membership to such institutions, and the boom in micro-businesses our Guild provides broad-based, inclusive representation and influencing for human-centered, small-scale, and community-rooted enterprises. Our innovative model fills the gap created by the rapidly changing face of work.  

Because of my experiences as Organiser / Director of the EETG, it is my mission to ensure that as we grow we pay our Organisers properly, and with your help, we can do just that. I would not wish the anxiety and stress that I went through as a rookie Organiser upon anyone.

Although I am still not well off and not a member of the property-owning class, there are obviously intersections of privilege and I understand I am one of the lucky ones. I am incredibly grateful to all the members past and present for teaching me so much about my vocation, about the culture of our community, and the innate social and economic value of Guild members.  I am so excited by the potential we have to create immense positive change at this decisive moment in history. I never stop learning from the people I work with. It is because of all my experiences both good and bad that I am committed to ensuring that no one is excluded from becoming a Community Organiser at the Guild because of their background or circumstances. 

I know that my Dad would be incredibly proud to see what our community achieved with the help of his encouragement.

We’ve done so much already, imagine what we could do with even more members and supporters and a new Community Organiser! As Margeret Mead said; “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has”. And think of the party we will have for our 10th birthday next year with all of us together again.

The additional member of staff we recruit with your support would help galvanise connections for recovery in East London. Please consider chipping in whatever you feel comfortable with to our Crowdfunder before it closes on Monday.

Remember, when we hit 10k we get match funding! Here’s that link again: https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/fair-rents-for-small-businesses

VAST GRATITUDE!

Krissie Nicolson, Founding Organiser and CEO of London Trades Guild & East End Trades Guild. 

Here is the full list of our current members, partners, and supporters;