People Make Glasgow Communities (PMGC) is an innovative partnership approach designed to enable communities to take a more active role in running local services or managing venues, buildings, and facilities. The programme aims to encourage more community services to be managed and delivered at the local level.
Ruairi Kelly, Glasgow’s Community Wealth Building Lead and Convener for Neighbourhoods and Assets, is responsible for implementing this programme. He is harnessing the city’s appetite for change and empowerment, delivering on this vision for his ward and across the city.
Originally from Ireland, Ruairi moved to Scotland to pursue an MSc in Environmental Entrepreneurship and decided to make Glasgow his permanent home. He was drawn to Glasgow by its strong economy, culture, international outlook, and welcoming attitude. Politically active since 2014, Ruairi was first elected in 2017 to represent the Glasgow North East Ward. He now serves as the City Convener for Neighbourhood Services and Assets.
In his role, Ruairi deals with essential yet often overlooked issues such as refuse bins, potholes, and street lighting—key components of urban quality of life. In his own words, it’s all about “getting the basics right.” Feedback from his residents shows that his approach is working. Under his leadership, satisfaction with street lighting and refuse collection has significantly increased. He continues to empower communities to take an active role in managing local services.
Re-elected in 2022, Ruairi prioritised refreshing Sustainable Procurement strategy 2023 – 2027. This strategy, developed through public consultation as to how best annual public spending totalling about £580 million could support suppliers with achieving net zero carbon goals and if the council should look at reducing emissions within the supply chain. Key principles include using procurement power to deliver beneficial outcomes for citizens and integrating Community Benefits Wishlists into the process.
In 2023, Ruairi won the Local Government Community Champion award for his work with various local projects, especially youth projects. As Chair of the Contracts & Property Committee, he ensured the effective implementation of community benefit clauses, leading Glasgow City Council to win the Procurement Team of the Year award.
Below, Ruairi delves into the challenges of his role, the successes of the PMGC programme, and his vision for the future of community empowerment in Glasgow.
What are you trying to achieve in your position?
As the City Convener for Neighbourhoods and Assets, my role is directly tied to everyday concerns like refuse bins and potholes. However, this position was specifically created to bring a new approach. The COVID-19 pandemic underscored the vital importance of local communities, with city governments worldwide leading the response while national and supranational bodies struggled.
We are committed to applying lessons learned from the pandemic and our community empowerment initiatives by co-designing liveable neighbourhoods with our citizens, often referred to as 20-Minute Neighbourhoods. In this role, I am responsible for our Community Wealth Building approach and leading our new Sustainable Procurement Strategy.
A longer-term goal is the rollout of our Neighbourhood Infrastructure Fund, which won the Open Government 2023 award for ‘Citizen Power’ in the Inspirational Reforms category. This initiative is recognized for devolving power to the neighbourhood level, enabling more localised decision-making and community-driven improvements.
What’s your personal motivation to do this job?
Seeing the services that result from the PMGC programmes keeps me motivated. Even though it only launched a little over three years ago, we have already received a remarkable 585 expressions of interest from groups seeking to become more involved in, and exercise more control of, assets which deliver sports, education and community services including parkland and green spaces.
In my own ward, the North East ward, Basketball Scotland, The Phoenix Centre and Easterhouse Community Sports Hub formed a Consortium as part of the PMGC process to successfully take on the management of a sports Centre. Most recently St. Paul’s Youth Forum began operating Molendinar Community Centre.
These are just some of the many examples across the city where we have built capacity in communities to either own, operate and deliver their own services and ambitions.
What are your main challenges?
My main challenge in this job is work life balance. As a father to a young child, trying to juggle evening community meetings with his nightly bedtime routine can be difficult. It helps that like many local governments we have embraced remote and flexible working. I usually get an early start to the day by checking emails and getting my son, Oisín, to the nursery.
Although it’s difficult, the expansion of childcare in Scotland will help greatly with these pressures and as a member of Glasgow’s Education & Early Years Committee, I take this goal very seriously because I know firsthand the difference it will make to families.
I have the flexibility to work in the office or at home, but I often find myself out in the community as that’s truly what my job is about. Whether it’s ensuring the roll out of our £10 million investment in on-street bin hubs or meeting with community groups that want to manage their own local facilities, I’m very much out and about all day – and into the evening.
The main frustration I find is the lack of accord given to local government by other elected members, the public or the press. Local governments are responsible for delivering a huge range of services to the public that impact residents in their daily lives at every stage of life. I believe we should be respected and resourced fairly for that.
Fortunately, I’m part of a great team here in Glasgow. Our cabinet and leaders always work for us to receive more funding and powers for local government.
When was the last time you felt that your position had a positive impact on your city’s inhabitants?
Being responsible for potholes and missed refuse collections, negative feedback is just an unfortunate reality of this role in any city. However, I was delighted to be nominated and win the 2023 Community Champion nationwide award from the Local Government Information Unit. It was really humbling to hear that I had been nominated for the PMGC programme, work on food poverty, and youth empowerment.
One notable example is the agreement Glasgow made with the world-renowned Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews to lease part of a local golf course. This deal resulted in a £10 million investment in a family-friendly ‘swing zone’ and a brand new community golf facility in the northeast of the city.
The new facility, which overlooks Hogganfield Loch, includes a Seven Lochs nature reserve information and activity space, providing outdoor learning activities for local schools and serving as a base for the Seven Lochs staff. The project involved extensive tree planting and seeding of native scrub, as well as pollinator-friendly planting, creating over three hectares of new species-rich wildflower grasslands and wetlands.
Opened in summer 2023, the new community golf and leisure facility achieved GEO Certified® Development status, created jobs and apprenticeships, and provides school children with access to the sport. This investment is transformative for the area, turning it into a national sporting destination.
If you had a magic wand, what could significantly improve the way you do your job?
The first thing I’d do is reverse Brexit. The people of Glasgow were always against the decision and Scotland as a whole universally rejected it. As an Irish citizen, I can see the day-to-day damage it causes. Brexit has limited Glasgow from reaching its full potential.
However, against the odds, Glasgow is overcoming the barriers of Brexit. It was recently confirmed as the top city for foreign direct investment in European large cities. Through Eurocities, we have been able to maintain – and even increase our European engagement. The warmth we have felt as a Scottish city from our neighbours and the team in Brussels is heartening and greatly appreciated.
And of course, massively increasing our budget would be helpful!
Pitch your job to other local, regional, national or European governments.
Getting the basics right is important. You can have all the policies you want, but if the core functions of the city are not working, you are in trouble. You are going to take the flack for them not working, so you need to have strong political involvement and responsibility when it comes to day-to-day services, that’s why my role was created.
Working with communities to build capacity and resilience is vital for a city’s ability to deal with shocks like COVID-19 and the cost-of-living crisis. The more you can put power and responsibility in the hands of local people the better the decision making will be and the more adaptable communities will be to the changing needs of our cities.
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This interview is part of ‘Urban Pioneers,’ a Eurocities series published every second and fourth week of the month spotlighting innovative and original job positions in municipalities across Europe. Each article in this series highlights a job position aimed at improving wellbeing, health conditions, society and the environment in cities. From tackling the urban heat island effect to countering gender imbalances to encouraging sustainable mobility, ‘Urban Pioneers’ showcases how cities are leading by example and breaking new ground in enhancing people’s quality of life. ‘Urban Pioneers’ jobs can inspire national, regional and EU authorities to create similar positions in their own structures, multiplying across Europe’s regions and nations the positive impact that started in cities.
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