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By Dr Wendy Sarkissian LFPIA

I must confess that when I heard about Becky Hirst, several years ago, I was absolutely terrified. It might sound funny for a person who’s got a community engagement award named after her, but I lacked the courage to meet this formidable woman. I was arriving at the unpleasant realisation that I was becoming an old fuddy-duddy.

We first met in 2013, when we were both speakers at a conference in Adelaide. Becky seemed so ‘modern’ as she enthusiastically presented on what communities can achieve using 21^st century technology. I did not want to embrace the online sphere. It did not interest me. And yet, I was running a consulting firm and I knew I had to get with the program. I had to understand what was going on.

Now I know that Becky has an honours degree in contemporary dance. Had I known that all those years ago, I’m not sure how I would have responded. Perhaps even more frightened. This woman knew things I did not know, and I was not sure that I could wrap my mind around them. She represented a vanguard. She was like a Valkyrie, leading people into new territory. And I was a reluctant conscript.

How foolish I was! I think I had been frightened away by the ‘corporate’ women in the slim black skirts and black high-heeled shoes, who came from associate degrees in communications and marketing and who, I felt, were trashing my profession. I could not believe what was going on. In the large Australian planning and engineering firms, a coterie of these young, bright, apparently competent, young women was ruining community engagement as I knew it. They were ‘lost leaders’, alright! Becky might be slender in appearance, and might occasionally slip into some heels, but she definitely is not one of those women.

I remarked at an Engage 2 Act inaugural event in Melbourne that I was seeking people in sensible shoes to engage with communities. That was my metaphor for real people getting ‘down and dirty’, being with actual people in their actual places of work and home and attachment. And trying to work out in the muddiness of human life what was actually going on. And what an ‘engagement’ intervention might look like.

Now I know this brilliant engagement practitioner who frightened me years ago. And, honestly, she is a marvel. And, unlike many people who write Forewords to books, I have actually read this book. I have read every word and every semicolon. I have even negotiated some of those semicolons with the author!

So, what do we have here?

Well, first of all, we have the first book by a skilled community engagement practitioner who is willing to tell us how it is. Not just the pretty side of it but the dark and ugly swamp of despair that sometimes threatens to drown us in this practice.

Becky Hirst is an authentic reflective practitioner: she’s consciously reflecting on her actions. She’s asking questions about how things could be improved. And, to make matters more challenging, she’s running a business and she’s successful at it!

When I agreed to help with this book, I had no idea that I had signed up for a voyage of discovery. I thought I was an expert in such matters. Well, I had a lot to learn. This book is jam-packed with vignettes about what really happens in community engagement in Australia and elsewhere. Fortunately, the names have been changed to protect the guilty but there are many despicable people in this book who clearly have no idea what engagement is about.

Further, Becky has put love on the table. Why shouldn’t we love our work? Why does love need to be relegated to romance or spiritual enterprises? Can’t we love our work, love the people we work with, even love our clients, however difficult they may be at times?

I say that Becky’s a reflective practitioner. But what exactly is a reflective practitioner, anyway?

If we turn to Paolo Freire, the liberation theologist, we find that he argues that consciousness alone is not enough. We must have what he calls meaningful praxis. And that means that action and reflection must happen together to result in the transformation of the world. We must be engaged so that our whole self is making sense of what is going on.

Maybe it takes an honours degree in contemporary dance to be embodied enough to do this work! Because it’s about being very, very present and constantly questioning what’s going on.

When I first began work as an engagement practitioner, I remember thinking that I was like an anthropologist. I didn’t really know anything about this alien culture I was entering, this new context, this new engagement project. So I was always asking people, ‘What is going on here? What are your perceptions? What are your understandings of life here in this place?’

People were often puzzled that I didn’t seem to have any expertise. I think I had some and I think engagement practitioners do have a toolkit of methods and approaches we can bring to a situation. But often we just need to be present. Frequently, we must ask: ‘Why is it so bad and how can we make it better?’

Sadly, but redemptively, this book is partly about why things are so bad in community engagement in Australia and how we could make them better. And it’s not just about bringing the love to the table, either. Sometimes you need to bring a really sharp, analytical consciousness to figuring out what on Earth is happening here. Like: How did this whole community, this whole town, this whole suburb lose faith in its future?

When people start talking to me about words like betrayal and stigma, I know that we’ve slipped over the edge somehow. The situation is serious! Something urgent needs to be done.

In the stories in her book, Becky is not only analysing situations, using reflection-in-action; she’s also suggesting how things might be improved (reflection-on-action).

Becky is constantly asking: ‘How can things be improved here?’

In this respect, she’s contributing to our body of professional knowledge by shining the clear light of day on hard truths we can’t escape. There are lots of relationships of oppression and domination in the practice of community engagement. So, why don’t we just admit what’s happening?

We don’t need to leave this analytical work to the academic sociologists. I’ll give you an example. On the consulting job I thought was probably my finest work, I made promises to residents of a community in south-western Sydney that their voices would be heard in the comprehensive redevelopment of their whole suburb. This was to be a PPP, a public-private partnership: the first of its kind in New South Wales involving the comprehensive redevelopment of a public housing estate. I was the agent. And there was a principal who finally arrived: a Melbourne building firm that had done similar work that was quite successful.

I ended up tangled in the Principal-Agent Dilemma that sociologists talk about. And the neighbourhood ended up being destroyed. Although millions of dollars were spent on probity investigations in selecting the private partner, nobody in government apparently asked what would happen if everything fell apart.

And in 2008, everything fell apart. In a distant Sydney suburb, the flow-on effects of the activities of Goldman Sachs in New York and the Global Financial Crisis destroyed the community renewal project and the builder went bankrupt. Apparently lacking a Plan B, all the New South Wales government could do was to erect barbed wire fencing around the partly constructed houses. And try to figure out what to do next.

The residents were devastated. Two of my beloved friends, both homeowners, who subsequently died, told me the following: ‘Wendy, we love you. We think you gave us everything and you tried really hard. We know that. And we learned heaps from you. And you need to know that your work resulted in the deaths of two elderly friends of ours. They died of broken hearts. They died feeling betrayed and hopeless that everything you had promised was destroyed.’

Those two women knew nothing about the GFC. But they knew what betrayal looked like and they lost hope. And they died. And it is well-documented that grieving for a lost home can result in death. We are not exaggerating here. This is the dark side of the Principal-Agent Dilemma.

Over the years, I’ve read insightful articles by academics about ‘participating the public’ and I thought they were quite smart. But the luxury of being an academic is that you can sit back and reflect on these things and you don’t have to worry about where your next consulting job is coming from. Not so with Becky Hirst.

Becky’s book is a scream from the depths of the dark swamp of engagement. It’s an authentic voice reminding us that all is not well in our profession in Australia. She’s celebrating that amazing, wonderful, and transformative processes can occur with community engagement. Individuals and communities can be transformed. The guiding hand of a skilled, reflective practitioner can definitely conjure up community transformation.

However, we must look directly into the eye of one evil aspect of our work. And that is the issue of influence. Repeatedly in this book, Becky points out how gatekeepers, the people with clout (often the senior men) squelch innovation and destroy opportunities for community influence over decision-making. If I had a dollar for every one of those gormless people I’ve encountered in my working life, I can’t say what I do with it! But it would be a lot of money!

But let’s be clear: this is a book about love. It’s a book about passion, enthusiasm, and a heartfelt commitment to community empowerment and community building. No question about that!

And it’s also a wail of despair and a warning to all of us. Do not enter this field if you are gutless. Don’t even think about becoming a community engagement practitioner just for the money. If you think it’s about communications and marketing, think again.

And if you are willing to be courageous, wear your heart on your sleeve, be blamed for your post-critical naïveté, and vilified for your enthusiasm, goodonyer!

Because that’s where the love will be. And you will find people loving you back. You will hear people telling you that they trusted you because when they were weeping after that terrible public meeting in that roasting hall a few days before Christmas, you sat beside them and held their hand. You will not even remember doing that because it was just a natural, loving thing to do.

You will find your soft heart opening and suffused with the love of community engagement. And you’ll be lining up behind the indefatigable Becky Hirst.

And I’ll be there to cheer you on. (One way or another.)

But don’t even come near it unless you are willing to be courageous.

All love needs courage. There is no love without courage. There is no authentic community engagement without love.

And there is no leadership in our profession without heart.

You will find heart in this book. Buckets of it!