InSolidarity Network

The InSolidarity Network was started at Ascension Church Hulme in 2022 and is a growing alliance of creatives, scholars, musicians, social enterprises and business leaders who share a commitment to enriching and enhancing networks of power across Hulme in Manchester. 

The common denominator is Ascension Church Hulme where some of the network’s collaborators are based and the partnerships have been fostered.

We draw upon the strengths and resources already present within our communities, brokering support between us as individuals, groups and with the church itself.

We celebrate Hulme’s history, arts, businesses and culture and we serve the needs and highlight the gifts of local people... come what may.

Insolidarity guiding assumptions and intentions

1. Jesus’ Revolutionary Journey of Peace

The person and story arc of Jesus is central to InSolidarity.  His life as a child refugee, his status as a survivor of genocide, his formation into a religious and cultural tradition, and his apprenticeship into a trade as a craftsperson and builder. 

He worked as a community builder, setting the conditions for effective sites of resistance to the multiple challenges those in his time were facing. Also his wisdom sharing through storytelling, his association with, and appreciation of the impoverished through acts of power, and training of successive healers and survivors. 

His drive for equity and equality for the disempowered and his love of enemy laid the ground leading to his public state execution for his solidarity with those suffering oppression. His subsequent Inspiration, and living legacy is one of the core reference points. 

2. Apprenticeship/Guilds

Not Mass Production but Production of the Masses. InSolidarity is about opportunities for skill transfers and skill exchanges for a common agreed and mutual purpose. Independent cinema, publishing and music which can protest freely, can express beauty and truth on its own terms, and is owned collectively on its own turf. This is a place where original art, articles, and artefacts can be commissioned, created and curated with an inclusive yet distinctive environment, generating communal and common abundance. 

3. Sanctuary for Exiles

Society may dehumanise, monetise and traumatise those perceived as outsiders and other.  Can active steps be taken in practice, policy, philosophy, and poetry to celebrate and implement the thoughts, knowledge, wisdom, and action of groups typically alienated from mainstream society? Based in our history as church and recent history as providing a shelter for Viraj Mendis in the 1980s there is an essential element of sanctuary in who we are and the way we practice our convictions.

4. Play Is Powerful 

Through the power of play and the embodied imagination we are invited to move towards innovative and effective ideas and performance with social impact. Through the play of power we are invited to make, break, mend, and bend rules to fit our various shapes and sizes. 

5. Cultures of Kindness 

Evolutionists indicate that human societies developed with a greater attention to collaboration over competition. Kindness towards self, neighbour, stranger and friend creates lasting and secure bonds which endure pressure and stress. 

InSolidarity Streams

Circles Those who seek mutual support and association with InSolidarity gather every 6 weeks to strengthen each other’s ideas and initiatives. 

Come What May A community gathering held around the feast of the Ascension.

Radical Reading Room Collective Building communities of resistance and power through the dissemination and denotation of knowledge.