A secular post! The Carrier Bag: Rethinking a Public Service

Every so often, an organisation or service gets described in a way that perhaps

doesn’t quite ring true to me. Or perhaps there is something more or beyond that

understanding that we could be missing out on?

It would be possible to see the Commissioning and Communities directorate I am

leading at Brighton & Hove City Council has been characterised as a collection of

potentially unrelated services: Community Cohesion, Commissioning, Children's

Safeguarding, Adult Learning and Libraries.

Different functions. Different histories.

No immediate or obvious single thread.

But I don’t really recognise this description.

And it’s made me think about carrier bags.

In her essay The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, Ursula K. Le Guin challenges the

idea that the most important human inventions were spears, swords, or tools of

domination. Long before those came along, she argues, our most transformative

technology was the container: the basket, the net, the medicine bundle. The thing

that enabled gathering, sharing, sustaining, and surviving together. The thing that

held what mattered.

The carrier bag doesn’t look heroic. It doesn’t conquer anything.

But civilisation doesn’t happen without it.

That feels like a useful metaphor for public services and especially for a directorate

like ours.

Different things, shared purpose

Yes, our services are different.

• Commissioning shapes how resources flow to meet need.

• Community Cohesion works with communities to reduce harm and build trust.

• Children’s safeguarding protects children and young people from harm,

  strengthens families, and intervenes early to prevent risk becoming crisis.

• Adult Learning creates routes into confidence, skills, and opportunity.

• Libraries provide safe, trusted, shared civic space for knowledge, culture, and

  connection.

  
  

You wouldn’t confuse one for another.

But that doesn’t make them unrelated.

Like the contents of a medical bag: bandages, instruments, medicines, gloves, each

exists for a distinct reason, but all are there in service of care.

What unites our services is not uniformity of function, but shared intent:

• to reduce inequality

• to build capability and resilience

• to create the conditions in which people and communities can flourish

Seen this way, the directorate isn’t a jumble of activities. It’s a holding space and

place from which change is possible and is delivered.

The work that rarely gets called heroic

Le Guin is clear that the stories we tell shape what we value. Hero narratives

privilege drama, conquest, singular acts. Carrier bag stories instead privilege

relationship, gathering, care, flourishing, change through growth and endurance.

Public service, especially community focused service, is profoundly carrier bag work.

It looks like:

• stitching partnerships together over time

• holding grief, anger, hope, and disagreement in the same space

• investing early, quietly, and preventatively

• Keeping the most vulnerable safe

• making places where people feel safe to learn, read, meet, ask, belong

This work doesn’t always produce a single “outcome” you can point to.

But remove it, and everything else becomes brittle and can fall apart.

A different way of seeing

If you look at our directorate through a narrow, functional lens, you can miss the

connective tissue. If you look through a carrier bag lens, different things come into

view.

You see how:

• libraries support cohesion and learning

• learning builds confidence and participation

• commissioning aligns resources to shared priorities

• safeguarding reduces harm, supports families, and enables children to thrive

• safely within their communities

• cohesion work creates the trust that makes all the rest possible

The value is in the relationships between the contents, not in reducing them to one

tool or story.

So, perhaps yes it is a bag.

But not a random one.

It’s a carrier bag: purposeful, relational, quietly essential.

And like Le Guin’s carrier bag, it exists not to dominate or dazzle, but to hold what a

city needs in order to live well together.