— Campsbourne Community Collective A room of our own: conviviality, reciprocity, possible futures
Kurdish Advice Centre, Haringey, London.
Campsbourne Community Collective (CCC) meeting at the Kurdish Advice Centre.
Housing matters. Local artists mobilise for a better future.
Monitoring the availability of affordable housing in Haringey.
In that instant, Jude understood. It wasn’t her helping them. She was part of the community, she too with her vulnerabilities. On the border that divides wealthy Haringey from poor Haringey, where railway tracks cut London into two segregated halves, there’s a working-class neighbourhood and a council estate that appears as a dark stain on the deprivation index map amid the white of wealth.
It’s there that every Friday, in a ramshackle building that’s been many things – a Black feminist centre in the Seventies, a workers’ pub, a youth club, and now a Kurdish migrant advice centre – a collective gathers that has made precarity its strength and research its weapon.The Campsbourne Community Collective (formed by residents with backgrounds from Africa and the Caribbean, Turkey, Kurdistan, and Bangladesh) has no statute, no hierarchy. It has one rule: anyone who lives or works in the estate can come, propose, and realise. Every week, the vast majority of the group shows up because eating together is the most important thing.Among those who arrive is Jude Fransman. For a long time, Jude thought she was there to help. With a politicised migrant background (her South African Jewish parents were anti-apartheid activists), she was raised in Scotland but schooled partly in Japan, where she was branded a dirty foreigner. This fuelled an interest in difference and connection and led to an academic career with formal qualifications and publications, political frameworks, and the certainty of someone who knows.In 2012, her daughter was born, and Jude started attending the neighbourhood school, the one that brings together children from million-pound houses and children living six to a room, families who had been in temporary housing for over a decade. There, she started talking to her fellow parents about what could be done together.It was 2019, there was Corbyn, a moment of socialist hope. They campaigned and built relationships. Then Corbyn was defeated, but the relationships remained. When COVID arrived, they were ready: mutual aid, food bank. Unlike all the other groups born during the pandemic, theirs survived because it was rooted in relationships, an ethos of inclusion, and a desire to make real change for the next generation.The collective works strategically with all the estate’s institutions: schools, migrant centre, sheltered housing, and Alexandra Palace – that 1870 “People’s Palace” that favoured the richer neighbourhoods and neglected the areas near the estate until COVID forced the poor to claim that public space too. And here’s the crucial point: they’ve trained community researchers and use research as a strategy for self-help and social advocacy. They’ve mapped food systems to build food sovereignty, documented housing conditions to pressure the Council, analysed care pathways to organise support. They even have a “time travel” program where they imagine the neighbourhood’s futures through speculative fiction and digital historical mapping and use this knowledge to inform their action and hold the Council accountable.Jude coordinates this research, maintaining collaborations with universities – the Open University, UCL, Birkbeck – but on the terms of the collective, inverting the traditional model. It’s no longer the university that brings a project and then leaves with the data. It’s the community that has an ongoing agenda and invites academics when needed, but control remains with the collective. Community research is rigorous and strategic, serves to defend rights, to negotiate, to build narratives that give power. It is also grounded in an ethics of care.One day, while coordinating projects and feeling like the one who helps, Jude fell ill. When her ringing phone showed the number of a struggling family she thought: I feel too awful, I can’t do it. She answered anyway, but the voice at the other end wasn’t asking for help: we’re outside your house; we’ve brought you food; the whole community contributed.In that instant, Jude understood. It wasn’t her helping them. She was part of the community, she too with her vulnerabilities. From that day on, she stopped thinking in terms of projects, objectives, and academic outputs. She started thinking in terms of long-term relationships and strategies. Research is an instrument of activism, rigorous, and at the service of the community. But it is also a way of understanding the local context, of valuing people’s lived experience, of bringing funds to struggling organisations and some income to struggling individuals, of creating space for friends to come together and trust to be built, and of mobilising the broader community in all its rich and sometimes conflictual diversity.Every week, something happens that surprises Jude, such as when a woman from Martinique proposed some guided tourist trips. Jude thought: this can’t be a priority. But she said to her: let’s try. And the response was overwhelming, especially from newly arrived Muslim families: isolated mothers who’d been afraid to go out and who suddenly found a safe group.Every Friday, in that centre full of boxes because there’s always the risk that it will be demolished, in that ramshackle place that precisely because of this can be many things, the collective gathers. The academics Jude invites must learn the rules: you can’t send Google Docs, you have to translate digital into paper or better still, spoken words, it takes three times as long, and you have to be present. Those who truly listen stay.The collective won’t save the world, but every Friday, it demonstrates that people can gather and build change. And in that centre’s precarity, there’s a principle that holds everything: reciprocity. Not charity, not one-way help, but that discovery Jude made when she was ill and understood that they were all giving to one another, all part of a collective fabric.Every Friday, while the world divides rich and poor with tracks and maps, inside that centre it’s demonstrated that another way is possible. Not perfect, not replicable, but alive: made of strategic research and shared meals, of struggles for space and laughter, of vulnerability and common strength. Collectively, stubbornly, strategically, joyfully alive.
Jude Fransman’s key dates
1980s · A childhood in South Africa shaped by her parents' anti-apartheid activism and experiences of antisemitism. An interest in social justice takes root.
1997-2007 · Voting against the Conservatives, a decade across China, France, Tanzania, Vietnam, Thailand and Mexico. Participatory programmes and adult education.
2011 · Doctorate on representations of migrant communities — an expert in community studies, it seems!
2015 · Corbyn reignites hope. Engagement with the local community. Disillusionment with academic research.
2020-2021 · Covid-19. Co-founding of a mutual aid network and a community research programme. It turns out she is not a community expert at all!
2050 (2025) · A future vision set in Birmingham. From solitary researcher to member of a community research collective.