How Scotland's communities are helping each other post-election

She’s setting up the Every Kid Christmas toy bank in response to an election result she fears will see child poverty rise again and inequality spiral yet further. And she’s doing it because she just can’t in good conscience sit back and watch that happen without doing … something.

She’s guessing lots of people feel the same because they have been meeting her at the Ice Box Arts and Music Centre in the Gorbals with cars spilling over, and more and more bags of donations just keep arriving.

By Friday, with the sun at its lowest ebb of the year, the community hall in this still deprived part of Glasgow – over four in 10 children here are living in poverty – is packed full.

There are big ticket toys such as games consoles, Buzz Lightyears jostle for space with Barbie dolls and houses, board games and books are stacked high next to a whole section of bikes, trikes and ride-alongs. There are stuffed animals, art materials, footballs and everything else you can think of.

READ MORE: Food bank demands to rise in December, charity warns

Yet by the end of the day you could fit what’s left in a couple of blue Ikea bags, and Wallace is left in shocked amazement. “We had queues out the door,” she says wonderingly.

“There were kids in that queue that were talking about how Santa had been busy all night getting everything ready. People were really good spirited. It shows that this is a service that was really needed.”

She worries that it’s going to get harder. “It is a shame that we have to do things like this,” she says. “But it reinforces the idea that there is still community right across Glasgow. What can you really do except to keep giving and to keep showing kindness and community and hope that the political process takes heed of that?”

Maybe it’s about the timing, coming just before Christmas, but since Scotland woke up to the results of the UK General Election to find that England had turned blue, placing a Conservative government back in power, many have had an unexpected response.

It might be easy to feel despairing. Instead there is a palpable sense of compassion and a determination to put energy into showing solidarity with those struggling.

Food banks across Scotland are reporting that donations are up, even on what they normally expect at Christmas. The Trussell Trust said there had been “an incredible wave of support” following the election, (and reminded politicians of that no-one should need to be referred, underlining the urgency of action).

Many claim that these are the types of actions that give them hope, at a time when politics that Scotland did not vote for – and from the policy architects of austerity, the hostile environment and welfare reform – could easily strip them of it.

Jonnie Wilkes (above, left), co-founder and DJ behind Glasgow’s legendary club night Optimo, says though these might be “challenging and dark days”, he and collaborator Keith McIvor (aka DJ Twitch, above, right) believe in “the energy of optimism”.

Their response is to commit to donating 100% of the profits of the club’s Hogmanay event to charity with proceeds divvied up between Drumchapel Food Bank, the Coalition for Racial Equality and Rights and refugee and migrant charity Positive Action in Housing. The night will see the debut of Second Citizen, a new outfit named “to mark our forthcoming new isolation in Europe”.

“Throwing parties to raise funds for these organisations is our way of bringing people together and perhaps channelling this “hope” into meaningful action,” he says.

In his view some of the most vulnerable people in Scotland have been made to feel “abandoned, lied to, isolated, de-humanised and downright ignored”, by the Westminster Government and he feels the need to do something about that.

“They began fragmenting our communities and our spirit decades ago but perhaps if the more able amongst us get up off our arses and do something practical, something positive, then we can begin to stitch ourselves back together,” he adds. “And maybe, we’ll be able to stand up again. I reckon we can draw immense strength, resilience and energy from togetherness and a shared purpose.”

READ MORE: Charity plea as one in 10 children face Christmas without warmth

At Lighthouse Books in Edinburgh the “pay it forward” noticeboard has been filling up since December 13, with customers who can afford it digging into their wallets to pay for extra books that can later be claimed by those on low or no income. “Reading is a right and nourishes thought and resistance,” reads one message on a label worth £5 – another at the same value is “for anyone in need of a pick-me-up”.

On Friday – the day the election results came out – Mairi Oliver, the shop’s owner, started to notice the number of customers approaching the till grasping American writer Rebecca Solnit’s Hope in the Dark, described as the ultimate “feel-good” text for exhausted campaigners and activists.

It’s now sold out. She’s noticed a particular mood in the air too. “The people in our community often felt devastated but I also think there was a sense that now is when we rally,” she says. “There’s that wanton desire to do something even in such difficult circumstances. Books, she claims, are both armour and weapon. “They are our shelter, an escape. But they also allow you to go out into the world informed enough to act.”

SOMETIMES being informed isn’t enough though. Wednesday was International Migrants’ Day. And it was also the day that Steffi Keir, a German born mother of two – who has lived here for 22 years and works for a children’s charity, paying her taxes – finally became a UK citizen.

It was a decision born of frustration and a sense of necessity. Like three million other settled EU citizens she had no vote in the Brexit referendum and the removal of her citizenship rights – later replaced by settled status – also led to a realisation.

“Previously held rights can very easily be removed and changed, leaving me in a vulnerable position,” she says. “There is no document that I can easily show to demonstrate I have settled status and right to live and work in the UK.

“I would say that the General Election campaign very much demonstrated that my decision to embark on the naturalisation process was the right thing.” It’s a view underlined by “xenophobic” and “alienating” remarks made by Boris Johnson, that EU citizens had “been able to treat the UK “as their own country” for too long.

She went to the polling station with her family but felt like an outsider as she watched her husband vote but was unable to do so.

Her decision to become a citizen means she will never have to do that again. “Becoming a citizen makes me feel that at last I have a proper right to political engagement, lobbying and engaging with my representatives,” she says. She too has felt the mood of community giving, donating money to a Trussell Trust food bank straight after the election. “I feel that the state is not properly providing the social net that it should provide, so while this is the case, we need to come together as neighbours and community to reach out and help each other,” she says. She is also thinking about her next steps, and has a growing sense that climate change is the issue she has to devote her energies to now. Her sense of purpose is sharpening, re-focusing.

For some, that focus is political, more specifically a renewed commitment to securing Scotland’s independence. More than 5000 people have joined the SNP since December 13, and even the Scottish Greens have experienced the bounce, seeing an additional couple of hundred members over the weekend straight after the election.

So far 14,000 people have registered on Facebook to attend All Under One Banner’s March for Independence on January 11, with a further 40,000 noting their interest.

But it’s not just those able to make it to marches and protests that are feeling it. Off the west coast on the tiny community owned Isle of Eigg, there’s a growing sense of the need for Scotland’s voice to be heard.

Maggie Fyffe, secretary of the Isle of Eigg Trust, says: “In the main folk here are disgruntled by what’s happened. The case for the SNP is even stronger than ever now. People may not agree with all their policies or everything the SNP does – we have lots of Green party members here too – but politics is part of life. We talk about it, we live it even though we can’t exactly be running off to rallies.”

She doesn’t believe achieving independence will be easy, and as someone who helped achieve that on a small scale when this island was passed into community control in 1997 she should know. “It’s just good that we are trying,” she says.

BUT back in Glasgow’s Govan, Gehan Macleod (below, left), co-founder of community social enterprise, GalGael, is still refining her thoughts about how best to respond to all society is currently up against.

Her husband, Colin Macleod (who died in 2005) was the founder of Pollok Free State in the nineties. The Glasgow protest encampment was set up in an attempt to thwart plans to build the M77 extension through the public woodland widely used by the local community, cutting them off from the park.

What started with a solitary man up a tree became a movement as people from all sorts of walks of life joined him, learning carving and other skills, and finding time and space allowed them to open themselves to the new thinking about what was possible.

They lost the fight in Pollok and the motorway was built. But the Macleods went on to set up GalGael, where community and boats are built and people who need hope are taught how to make felled logs into beautiful wooden things.

“The mandate that the SNP have is a light in the darkness,” she says. “But personally, I find it hard not to be concerned at the state of democracy globally. The latest election result is symptomatic of that.

‘‘For me there are deep questions now about how we reclaim some sort of humanity in facing collapse in some of the fundamental institutions on which our society has been built, not to mention collapses induced by climate breakdown.”

But what are those other structures? How do we work on them unless we can imagine what they might look like? “Currently much of our society is acting as if there is no alternative to capitalism,” she says. “And to an extent that is true.

“The mechanisms of work mean that all their energy goes into making ends meet. The reforms to welfare systems, which see people forced into evidencing 35 hours a week of job searches tie people’s time up so there is no energy or creativity left to look at how we might organise society differently.

So it’s time to reframe the narrative, she says. “We need to find new forms of activism in response to the challenges we’re facing. We need new forms of resistance.”