A Churchill Fellowship? Me? Are you absolutely sure you’ve got the right person?!
Well, here goes! My first proper blog about an adventure that, if I’m being completely truthful, I still can’t quite believe is happening!
Me? Ema Wilkes? From Wirral? A Churchill Fellow?
How the hell did that happen?
I mean, seriously, how does someone like me end up being given an opportunity to travel around Europe, meet incredible people, explore how communities work in other countries and bring all that learning back home? Why would they choose me? Surely there are people with more qualifications, more academic experience, better writing skills and probably a much better understanding of what they’re getting themselves into! Yes, before anyone says it, I know I should probably have a bit more confidence in myself by now. But that’s easier said than done!
Because the truth is, behind all my excitement, enthusiasm, determination and ability to talk the hind legs off a donkey about anything community-related, there’s still that little voice that occasionally says:
Ema, who on earth do you think you are?
Well, apparently, I’m a Churchill Fellow!
And I thought it was about time I shared how this whole adventure began.
Something I’ve wanted to do for years
I’ve known about the Churchill Fellowship for years. Every so often I’d look at it, read about the incredible opportunities people had been given and think how amazing it would be to travel, learn from communities in other countries and bring some of that knowledge back to Wirral. And then I’d find a reason not to apply; The children were too young. Neo was too young. There was too much happening at work. We were growing, developing new projects, supporting more people, dealing with funding, buildings, staff, volunteers and the usual million and one things that come with running a community organisation.
How on earth could I leave it all?
And if I’m being completely truthful, those were all very convenient excuses for something else too.
I wasn’t entirely convinced that someone like me would ever be chosen.
I’ve never been the most confident person when it comes to putting myself forward for something that feels academic or formal. I have dyslexia, and although I’ve learnt lots of ways to manage it, it still creates challenges. I can sit and have conversations about poverty, community development, food, families, young people and the changes we need to make for hours. Believe me, just ask anyone who has ever suggested we have a quick coffee, but ask me to put all those thoughts into a formal application, or sit in front of an interview panel and explain myself, and suddenly it becomes a very different story.
Sometimes the ideas are all there, but getting them out in the right order, finding the right words and remembering everything I want to say can be incredibly frustrating, and when you’ve spent parts of your life feeling that you aren’t quite clever enough, qualified enough or the sort of person who belongs in certain rooms, those feelings don’t just disappear. But one thing I’ve learnt over the years is that knowledge doesn’t only come from classrooms, qualifications and textbooks. It comes from lived experience. From listening. From making mistakes. From building relationships. From working alongside people and communities every single day, and perhaps it’s taken me a long time to properly recognise that what I’ve learnt through my own life, and through building Neo, has value too.
Why now? And why From Pantry to Power?
Something has changed over the last couple of years. My children are older, Neo has grown, and although life is still as wonderfully chaotic as ever, I feel more confident about where we are as an organisation. We have an incredible team, volunteers, trustees, partners and community members who make things happen every single day. My Neo village! I’ve slowly had to learn that everything doesn’t need to stop just because I’m not physically there.
But there’s another reason I finally felt ready to apply.
I’m more convinced than ever that the way we approach poverty, community support and decision-making needs to change.
For years, we’ve worked alongside people experiencing some of the most difficult circumstances imaginable. Food poverty, financial hardship, isolation, families struggling, young people needing safe spaces and people simply wanting somewhere they feel they belong, the immediate support matters. Of course it does. Nobody should be hungry while we’re busy discussing long-term solutions! But I keep asking myself the same questions.
Why are we so often responding to the same problems year after year?
Why do communities sometimes have so little say in decisions that directly affect them?
Why do we spend so much time talking about what communities need without properly recognising what communities already have?
How do we move from constantly delivering support towards creating more opportunities for communities to shape, lead and own their futures?
Now, this is really important to me.
Community power isn’t about fighting the powers that be.
It isn’t about councils, funders, professionals, organisations and communities being on opposite sides. In fact, I believe quite the opposite. We need to work together. Properly, with honesty, trust, mutual respect and a willingness to share power, knowledge, resources and decision-making. Because communities have incredible skills, experience, ideas and relationships, but they shouldn’t be expected to solve everything alone, equally, the organisations and institutions making decisions don’t have all the answers either. Imagine what we could achieve if we genuinely brought those strengths together. Not just consultation exercises where the decisions have practically already been made. Not simply asking people what they think and then carrying on as before, but real involvement, real ownership and real opportunities for people to shape the places where they live. Let’s not forget, we already have so much of this happening in Wirral.
At Neo, some of our most wonderful groups and activities are led by community members themselves. People supporting each other, sharing skills, creating friendships and making their neighbourhoods stronger. I don’t want to travel abroad and come back telling everyone that other countries do everything better. I want to learn, share, question, challenge my own thinking and recognise what we already do brilliantly, explore how we could do even more.
That’s where the idea for From Pantry to Power really came from. Moving beyond simply providing food and responding to crisis, towards exploring how communities can build more influence, ownership, opportunity and resilience. And eventually, I ran out of excuses. I applied!
Then came the interview… OH MY GOD!
Getting through the application was exciting enough.
But then came the news that I’d been shortlisted for an interview, an actual interview! With a panel! They would decide whether I should be awarded a Churchill Fellowship, and that was absolutely terrifying. I knew what I wanted to explore. I knew why it mattered. I knew the work, the communities and the challenges. But sitting in front of people who were going to question me about it? Completely different story! So I came up with a very sensible plan.
I made Joan and Heather come to London with me! 😂
Officially, we were having a lovely few days away together. A little trip, some sightseeing and a change of scenery. Unofficially, I needed them to make sure I actually got to that interview and didn’t turn around and run in the opposite direction! And I’m so glad they came, because what happened the day before my interview became something much more emotional than I’d expected.
Back to Parliament, back to the beginning, and back to Frank
The day before my interview, we visited the Houses of Parliament. We were incredibly lucky to meet with Alison McGovern MP and even managed a quick photograph and chat with our lovely friend Matthew Patrick MP. For Joan and Heather, it was their first time visiting Parliament, and I absolutely loved being able to share that experience with them. I’ve always thought it was such a special place to visit, and I wanted them to experience it too, but for me, that day was about so much more than visiting Parliament. It was about going back to a place that holds some incredibly special memories. Memories of the early days of Neo. Memories of conversations that helped shape so much of what we went on to do and memories of someone who played an enormous part in helping me believe in myself.
The late, great Frank Field, Baron Field of Birkenhead.
Frank will always be such an important part of Neo’s story, and of my own. He believed in what we were trying to achieve, encouraged us, opened doors and helped me find confidence in places where I might never have imagined I belonged. He was someone who made me feel that the experiences of ordinary people, and the voices of our communities, deserved to be heard and walking through Parliament again brought so many memories flooding back.
I even walked past one of his famous lockers! Anyone who ever visited Frank in Parliament might remember him showing you one of his many ‘first lockers’, where he kept his apples! It didn’t matter whether he was showing adults around or bringing children to experience Parliament for the first time. There was always so much to show you, so much to tell you, and somehow the apples and lockers would become part of the tour! I couldn’t help smiling as I walked past. Then we sat in the Members’ Bar, chatting, and I found myself looking around the room. And remembering. So many conversations. So many visits.The people Frank introduced me to. The discussions about poverty, food, communities, fairness and the things that needed to change. The times he made sure I was part of conversations I might otherwise never have imagined being included in.
And, of course, some absolutely hilarious memories! I’ll never forget one visit when I was standing looking out over the water, taking everything in, and Frank had wandered off and left me in the Members’ area. Next thing I knew, I had armed police approaching me! Now, you would think I’d have come up with a sensible explanation for why I was standing somewhere I probably shouldn’t have been. But no. All I managed to say was:
“Frank Field!”
And they laughed! Something along the lines of, “Oh, again! Don’t worry!” Apparently, Frank wandering off and leaving his visitors in the wrong place wasn’t exactly unheard of! I still laugh thinking about it, even when he did it a second time leaving me and eve sat in a corridor! But sitting there again, all these years later, with Joan and Heather beside me, the day before one of the biggest interviews of my life, I felt something else too. I felt incredibly grateful, because Frank was one of those people who believed in me before I had really learnt to believe in myself.
And sometimes, that’s all it takes, someone who sees something in you, someone who encourages you and who gives you the opportunity to learn, to speak, to be involved and to grow. I wish Frank could have known about this Fellowship. I would have loved to sit down and tell him what I was hoping to do, the places I wanted to visit, the people I hoped to meet and all the ideas I wanted to bring home.
Community power. Having a voice. Being listened to. Being given opportunities. And recognising that people are capable of so much more than the circumstances they find themselves in.
Right then… time to actually face the interview!
After all that emotion, sightseeing and reminiscing, there was still the small matter of the actual interview, the reason we’d come to London in the first place, and yes, I was still absolutely terrified. Joan and Heather had done their job, They’d got me there and not running away. I had to walk through that door and give it my best shot. That’s what I did. I didn’t pretend to be someone I’m not. I didn’t suddenly become an academic or someone who can deliver perfectly rehearsed answers. I was just me. A woman from Wirral who has spent years working alongside communities, seeing both the incredible things people can achieve and the challenges that hold them back. Someone who believes we have to find better ways of working together. Someone who knows we don’t have all the answers and desperately wants to keep learning.I shared my ideas, my experiences and what I hoped to achieve, and then I came home, with a good few drinks on the train!
The morning that changed everything! 💙
It was just a normal morning at Neo. I was sitting with Phil and Kelli, planning our day, a million things to do, conversations going in every direction, things needing sorting, people needing answers and probably somebody popping their head around the door with another little job! Just another day in the wonderful chaos of Neo, and then as i often do I get distracted and then I looked down at my phone.
There was an email, from the Churchill Fellowship, Oh my God!
I HAD GOT IT!!!!!!
ME!
I’d actually been awarded a Churchill Fellowship! After all those years of thinking about applying, all those doubts, the application, the interview, the nerves. Somebody had read my ideas, listened to what I wanted to achieve and decided that I was worth investing in.
That the learning I wanted to undertake mattered.
That the experiences I could bring to it had value.
And that I should be given this extraordinary opportunity.
I honestly don’t think I could quite believe what I was reading.
And what made it even more special was that I was sitting in Neo, with everyone, in the very place that had been such a huge part of why I’d applied in the first place, It wasn’t just about me being given an opportunity to travel. It was about everything we’d learnt, everything we’d built, the people we’d worked alongside and the possibilities of what we might do next.
From our little corner of Wirral to an international learning adventure.
And then my whole village got behind me!
What happened next was just wonderful, the messages, the congratulations, the excitement and the genuine happiness people showed for me.
My family.
My friends.
My colleagues.
Our volunteers.
Our community members.
Our partners and supporters.
My amazing Neo village.
People who know me, know how much this work means to me and know just how enormous this opportunity feels and then even the local press picked up the story! From Wirral, heading off around Europe to learn about communities and bring ideas home!
I mean, come on! It was all a little surreal, but the support meant more than I can properly put into words, because although I’m the one travelling, this journey isn’t just about me. It’s built on years of relationships, experiences, encouragement, challenges, mistakes, laughter and learning. It’s about the people who have believed in me when I haven’t always believed in myself, and the communities that have taught me more than any textbook ever could. I might be the one getting on the trains, planes and, apparently, far too many bicycles, but there’s a whole village coming with me in spirit.
And I hope they’ll all come along for the journey through this blog too!
So, what exactly am I going to do?
My Churchill Fellowship research is called From Pantry to Power. I’ll be travelling to the Netherlands, Germany, Denmark and Portugal to explore different approaches to community development, community ownership, food, shared resources and the relationships between communities and the organisations and institutions that support them. I want to understand how communities organise themselves. How people share skills and resources. How community spaces become places of belonging and opportunity. How food can bring people together rather than simply being something handed out in a time of crisis. How young people are given a real voice, and how public bodies, funders, organisations and communities can work together with genuine mutual respect. I’m not looking for a magic answer. I’m certainly not expecting to find a perfect country or a perfect project, and I’m not going to pretend that everything I see abroad will automatically work back home. I want to ask questions. Lots of them!
I want to listen, observe, learn, challenge my own assumptions and have conversations with people who are doing things differently. I want to bring that learning back to Wirral, to Neo and to the wider network of communities and organisations who are all trying to make things better, because this isn’t about coming home with a lovely report that nobody ever reads.
It’s about turning learning into action.
Trying new ideas.
Building relationships.
Sharing what works.
Being honest about what doesn’t.
And exploring how communities can have more influence over their own futures.
Community power starts with people. With relationships. With trust. With believing in each other.
So here I am.
Ema from Wirral.
Founder of Neo Community.
Mum of three.
Dyslexic.
Still learning.
Still asking far too many questions.
And now, somehow, a Churchill Fellow!
I’ve got a suitcase, a head full of ideas, an absolutely wonderful village behind me and a whole lot of adventures ahead.
And if you fancy coming along for the ride, I’d love to have you.
Just don’t expect me to always know where I’m going!
From Pantry to Power – here we go!
Ema x
Churchill Fellow | Founder & CEO, Neo Community
These blogs share my personal experiences, reflections and learning. The views expressed are my own and do not necessarily represent those of the Churchill Fellowship.
