Telling Working Class Stories: A Q&A With The Working Class Collective

At The Social Change Nest, we support over 500 grassroots groups and community projects through our fiscal hosting service. We recently sat down with Lisa McKenzie, founder of the Working Class Collective, to talk about their work highlighting the experiences of working class communities through art and storytelling.

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Hi Lisa! Can you tell me a bit about the Working Class Collective and how it started? 

It all started with a book we created during lockdown, called the Lockdown Diaries of the Working Class. I’m a sociologist and ethnographer, and at the beginning of the lockdown I thought it would be interesting to get people from my community to write diaries about their experiences of the pandemic. I asked the university I work at if I could have some money to do it, but they said no. So I just thought, fine, I’ll do it myself!

A few of us set up the Working Class Collective, mainly just to publish the book. But then we started thinking about the lack of platforms for working class writers and artists and we wanted to continue working together, to keep telling the stories of working class people. We’ve carried on collecting stories. We’ve organised events in our local village, a former mining village called Bestwood, and we’re planning an art exhibition as well. 

How did you hear about fiscal hosting and why did you want a fiscal host?

At the Working Class Collective, none of us have good credit records. We didn’t know how to open bank accounts and stuff like that. I just started Googling and found out about fiscal hosting and the Open Collective platform, and I thought, this is perfect for us. We can put the money that we got from the book into a safe place and use it to continue other projects. 

What are the main challenges you face as a small organisation? 

It’s time and money really – the same old things! There aren’t enough opportunities for working class people to tell our stories. People are desperate to tell their stories and I’m inundated with messages, but I can’t help everybody. Everything takes time and everything takes money. We’ve got an ethos where we don’t ask people to do things for free. Because you can’t complain that the creative industries always ask working class people to do things for free, and then do that yourself as well. I’ve always said if it comes to exploiting someone, I’d rather not do it. 

What advice would you give other organisations who are just starting out?

Just know that it’s going to be difficult. Perhaps the things you want to do might not be welcomed by everybody, but if you believe in something and you’re doing it for the right reasons, you’ve got to get on with it… Because if you wait for other people to do it, it won’t happen!

I’m also a big believer in getting people together, and being in the same room at the same time. We’ve been forced online in the last few years. I’ve watched social movements try to exist online, and virtual meetings can be helpful, but if you really want to make change you need to get people into a room together. You need to be making face to face connections and be in spaces that foster creativity. Even if it’s just once a year, it really makes a difference.

What are your hopes and dreams for the future? 

We want to keep going. We still don’t like to talk about class in the UK. It’s difficult for people with resources and power, because it implicates them. They don’t want to admit there’s a class system, because then they have to admit that they’re benefitting from it. So we want to have the conversation and talk about working class experiences. And  if we’re not allowed on existing platforms then we want to build our own. 40 years ago, we had our own spaces, like working men’s clubs and miners welfare centres and community centres. I’d like to re-open those physical spaces and bring them back to life with creativity and storytelling and art. I think that’s really important.

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A huge thank you to Lisa for sharing her story. If you’d like to find out more about the Working Class Collective or donate, you can visit their Open Collective page here: The working class collective – Open Collective.