On a Saturday in September, we were guests at a gathering of Worcester voluntary and community groups at Arch 27. Friends of parks groups, and people running all sorts of small organisations, most of them doing the same work in isolation. Our job for half an hour was not to present anything. It was to ask one question.
Ten years from now, a Saturday. Something is better for your group than it is today. What got better, and what made it better?
The usual way to ask a group what it needs is to ask what is wrong. That gets you a list of complaints, and it usually gets you the loudest people in the room. So we tried the opposite. Ask what already got better, and keep it small enough to answer in a sentence. Ten years is far enough away to be a story. A Saturday is close enough to picture. We borrowed the shape from Rob Hopkins and the Transition movement: don't argue people into a future, let them build a piece of it in their hands.
Then we did something that looked, on the face of it, like a waste of a serious meeting. We put pipe cleaners, modelling clay and sticky notes on the tables. Three corners of the room, one question, and you chose one. No rotation, no working your way round all three.
- In one corner, we told a short story set in that better Worcester. A character in it needed a hand. You got a pipe cleaner and showed what could help them, then said what your thing was and who it helped.
- In one corner, a camera pointed at a clay scene. Between frames, everyone made one small change to their own piece, and could join it to someone else's. Nobody touched anyone else's work. The scene built itself and played back at the end, a few seconds of film we made together.
- In one corner, a wall of notes. One for what you can offer, one for what you would want help with, one for what you would share with another group. Stick them up, move them if you change your mind.
We said from the start that we were guests. Nobody had to speak. Nobody had to make anything good. There was a right to pass, a right to watch, and a right to step out and come back. Play is not decoration to us. It is how the people who would never put their hand up end up saying the thing that matters.
And then the room started telling us things. [ADD THE MOMENT THAT STAYED WITH YOU FROM THE NIGHT. WHAT DID SOMEONE MAKE, OR SAY, THAT YOU WEREN'T EXPECTING?]
[QUOTE: Participant, Worcester community group, 26 Sep 2026] [QUOTE: Participant, Friends of parks group, 26 Sep 2026]
What we noticed is that the future got easier to talk about once it had an object in front of it. People who arrived saying their group was too small, too tired, too stretched, were soon building a version of it where something had gone right. Not a plan. Not a funding bid. A better Saturday.
We came into this work out of Roots & Routes, where the idea was simple: Worcester has a carrier bag full of people doing good work in isolation, and the most useful thing we can do is help them find each other before we ask them to do anything in particular. This evening felt like the same thing again, for the parks groups and the other small organisations who each guard their own patch.
We are still making sense of what people told us. Everything made on the night is photographed into a record, and a one-page "what we heard" goes back to the groups within a fortnight, in their own words, not ours. If something in it wants to happen, there is room to say so. Nothing was decided on the night, and we were clear about that.
What we took home was a smaller lesson. If you want to know what a community needs, asking what is broken is one way. Asking what a better Saturday looks like, and handing someone a pipe cleaner, turns out to be another. It is slower. It is also a lot more honest. We are still working out where this goes next, and we would rather do that with the room than for it.