Читать книгу For the Love of Community Engagement - Becky Hirst - Страница 5

Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time.

We are the ones that we’ve been waiting for.

We are the change that we seek.

― Barack Obama¹

It was 1997. I perched on the edge of my single bed in my tiny university bedroom in the north of England. I was curiously opening a package sent by the Labour Party as part of their election campaign for the upcoming national election. The package contained a VHS video tape. How cool to send such a thing to students across the country, I thought to myself! I quickly popped it into my on-trend television with built-in VHS, and music began to pour loudly from the little television. Things can only get better by UK nineties pop band D:Ream was the signature campaign tune.² I have no idea what else this short film contained, but the memory of this song and its associated political messaging has stayed with me since my 19-year-old-self opened that package.

At the time, I would not have understood why things needed to get better. I was deep in student life, studying for a Bachelor of Arts with Honours in Contemporary Dance, I had little understanding of politics beyond the antics of the Pilates studio where I spent many hours, strengthening my core to prepare to become a professional dancer.

I have few childhood memories of significant happenings at a societal level. Maybe some snippets of miners’ riots on the evening news, IRA bombings, the Falklands War, and something to do with Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher having stopped our free milk in schools.

When I think of my high school years, whilst I loved and gained so much from my time at a great girls grammar school in Gloucester, I remember being taught very little about anything current at a societal level. The focus was largely on textbook academia. Even my careers advice was limited, with me knowing exactly how to fudge the little tests they gave us so that the results would tell me that I should be a dance teacher. I feel sad that even a good education for a young girl in as late as the 1990s did not include someone helping me explore different career options – for someone to note my interest in geography, or business studies, or communications – and to encourage me to look at studying topics that I now know I love. I was pigeonholed as a dancer and so dance I would.

And I’m still pleased I was able to study a topic at University that I loved. But oh, how I would have also loved to study international politics or business studies! But it wasn’t even on my radar. My older sister, Helene, who had been through the same school nine years ahead of me, had been told that ‘girls weren’t good at physics’ and was encouraged to consider career choices other than engineering, which she was considering at the time.

Later, I realised that I could not attend University for free. Because of changes in government policy, I needed student loans and my parents’ support. Not so for Helene, whose education was fully funded only nine years earlier. Helene graduated with a Double Honours Degree in Mechanical Engineering and Economics by the way, showing that determination really does run deep in us Hirst girls!

Coincidentally with my realisations about the impacts of society on my various life choices, one of my university lecturers introduced me to the concept of community. Dr Chris Lomas was Head of Dance at Bretton Hall College. I remember a rainy afternoon lecture with her about definitions of community. This was not a typical university context. In an Arts degree with a dominant practical focus, we rarely sat in lecture theatres. I remember the pain as I sat on the dance studio floor, my back leaning against the floor-to-ceiling mirror, probably having finished a class in technique, choreography, or something equally exhausting.

Dr Lomas shared an article that examined the concept of ‘community’ as communities of locality, communities of interest and communities of identities. That single article was a revelation, and it sparked my lifetime interest in community.

Ever since I had a quick play of the game of Sim City during my teenage years, I was fascinated by how people live, do business and play in a community of place. Within the game, I loved the concept of starting the building of a city around an industry. So, for example, I’d say, ‘let’s build a wind farm’. I’d pop a wind farm onto the empty screen, with nothing around it. But then, of course, people would be needed to work at the wind farm, and they’d need to live somewhere, so I’d build some housing. And then I’d need to build ways for people to get from their homes to that wind farm – say, roads or bike paths. And then the people who live in the houses would need to buy food from somewhere. So in would go a supermarket, and then a farm to supply to the supermarket. And I’d need more people to work in the supermarkets.

And, of course, things that couldn’t be grown on the farm needed to be brought in from elsewhere, so I’d need to build a freight rail line or an airport, plus warehouses. I’d need train drivers and pilots and warehouse staff. And then, I’d need banks, post offices, pharmacies, and more. And the people in the houses would spend their weekends hiking through the nearby country park or swimming at the local swim centre. Their children would need schools, and playgrounds, dance studios, and sports fields. I’d need teachers, coaches, and people to maintain all the places. Before I knew it, I’d built a little community of place, with all the different people operating within it, all playing integral roles.

I absolutely loved playing this game, perhaps to the point that I should have been encouraged into a career of urban planning. But actually, on reflection, it was the interaction of the people within the community and different communities of interest within it that fascinated me. And even more, I was fascinated by how that community had formed with an initial purpose, and how that purpose was not necessarily of direct interest to the people within that community. That was because other industries had now grown to be their employers. Today, with my clients, I will often describe ‘community’ as people who live, work and play in an area, based on this exact concept.

There is no community on Earth that I’ve worked in that illustrates a game of Sim City in real life more than when I’ve worked in the outback town of Roxby Downs in South Australia. I undertook work with the Council and the Community Board during 2013 and I remember looking out of the tiny plane window as we began our descent to the endless flat red desert land. And then to see the tiny town appearing in the distance – just a dot on the horizon. And to recognise its entire reason for being: the Olympic Dam (a copper, uranium, gold and silver mine), next to the town.

This concept of community made me think of a petri dish in a science lab – a contained, defined area where all kinds of cells, cultures, patterns, and growth can be witnessed. In Roxby Down’s case, there were unique aspects to life in this town. For example, having a really high birth rate because of the demographic of workers moving to the town to work in the mine. And then being a wealthy community because of readily available, highly paid work. The town had little poverty and most of the town’s residents were shift workers. I’ve loved working there a couple of times now and always enjoy a morning run around the entire circumference of the town – town to the left me, desert on the right.

Even when a community isn’t located in the outback, with such a defined border defining exactly where that community ends, every community has these sorts of layers and boundaries, and a reason for being. Whether the community is a high-rise residential tower, a suburban street, a tribe in the deepest, darkest jungle, or a city of 10 million people, in my mind, each of these communities is a petri dish. And that fascinates me.

To illustrate my deep-rooted interest in this concept, one of my favourite films is The Truman Show, where Jim Carrey’s entire life is (totally unknown to him) being telecast live around the Earth 24 hours a day, within a totally purpose-built, almost petri-dish-like community. And a song I often sing to my daughters to ease them into sleep is Little Boxes, by Malvina Reynolds. My favourite lines are about the people in the houses who all go to the university and all come out the same! Reynolds wrote this song as a political statement about the uniformity and sameness, of houses along suburban streets with identical floor plans. Perhaps via this bedtime singing I’m subconsciously training my daughters to be community planners!

Back to 1999 and my final year at University. I expanded my interest in dance and the arts in community settings across West Yorkshire. My final assessment reflected my newfound passion: a group of seven high-school non-dancing boys choreographed and performed my final assessment! The image below shows them rehearsing for the piece called The Road We Travel, a dance based on patterns and space using their individual journeys to school as a movement stimulus to create patterns of varying dynamic, levels and direction. Apparently, this was yet another indication of my yearning for a career in community planning!

Image 1 - Boys at Crofton High School rehearsing for The Road We Travel, my final assessment at University. Photo by author, 1999.

A couple of years later, I graduated with honours and a new passion: discovering opportunities for making things better. At the tender age of 21, I retired from dance to embrace my love of community.

The beginning of my career coincided with an era immediately following decades of Thatcherism, with a focus on austerity and cuts more than what people needed. Prime Minister Tony Blair’s more socially inclusive and progressive ideology was spreading across the nation, reflected in significant investment into public services and a flurry of job openings focusing on community. I applied for and won a National Lottery-funded post in a local, highly deprived and disadvantaged community. My professional life in community engagement then began.

Only now, looking back on my opportunities during those early Blair years of New Labour can I begin to see the impacts of this significant political shift as a catalyst for my journey of passion for conversation, connection, collaboration, and community. My reflection has extended to my childhood years and their effects on my emerging community consciousness. I know that childhood has dramatic and longstanding influences on the values we hold as adults. That gets me thinking about COVID-19 and its effects on the career decisions of children and young people currently living through the pandemic. When I consider the displays of leadership (or lack of leadership) internationally during the pandemic, I wonder about the sorts of leaders these young people might become. Only now, decades after receiving that VHS tape, I realise the significance of the political and societal context in which we operate as community engagement practitioners.

In recent times, I’ve heard community engagement leader Kylie Cochrane describe a Social Triangle™ theory³ – a triangle of society, where the three corners represent politics, religion, and community. She discusses the politics and religion corners, reflecting on the recent demise of trust in these two elements of society. Later she emphasises the strong role that community plays in modern society. Kylie argues that, as engagement in religion or politics diminishes as societal connectors, there will be greater emphasis on being a part of our local community – our children’s schools, local sporting clubs, service clubs, environmental groups, and more.

I agree with Kylie. In a few decades, I believe that we will recognise the deep significance of low levels of trust in government, business, media, and even not-for-profit organisations. And we will come to understand the impacts on community engagement. We will also acknowledge the effects of the widespread ability of people everywhere to share their opinions through a massive range of online tools. It is a truism that our political leaders, both locally and globally, continue to miss the mark. But there is a huge opportunity nested in this massive failure of leadership. Now, more than ever, we must focus on community-led involvement and activism. We must strive to put people back at the centre of our communities.

In 2013, I caught a glimmer of the potential of a political leader understanding the importance of community engagement when I was appointed to the Premier of South Australia’s newly formed Community Engagement Board. How refreshing – a leader of a political party seeking advice on genuine community engagement from specialists! The image overleaf shows me, with His Excellency the Honourable Hieu Van Le AC and Kate Simpson at one of our regular meetings. Sadly, in 2014 the same Premier announced that as part of government reform to improve efficiency, every government board and committee would be abolished unless it could demonstrate that it had an essential purpose that could not be fulfilled in an alternative way. The Community Engagement Board was no more, and instead the Government turned to its own internal resources to engage directly with communities.

Image 2 - Myself, with leaders His Excellency the Honourable Hieu Van Le AC and Kate Simpson at one of our regular Community Engagement Board meetings. Photo by author, 2013.

For decision-makers (politicians, public servants, corporations, or others) to engage with communities in any positive way, they need to learn new skills. They must abandon stale, top-down approaches of simply broadcasting their messages. They need to embrace two-way dialogue with the people they serve. This is an emergency. We desperately need leaders who listen, empathise, and make considered decisions, based on the contributions of communities of interest and those affected by their actions.

I have an active interest in gender equity, particularly in the political and community leadership space. I strongly believe that feminine principles of leadership are a resource that must be expressed in the 21^st century. For hundreds of years, men have taken the lead in the establishment of governance in communities – locally, nationally, and globally. I often wonder what our governments would look like had middle-aged mediocre men had less self-assured confidence and had women been able to lead the development of these systems. In Authority Magazine,⁴ Akemi Fisher describes the feminine principles of leadership as collaboration, empathy, strategy, long-term planning, and people first. She notes that people are loyal to leaders who are authentic, genuine, and care about their team members.

Just imagine a world where our political leaders demonstrated the feminine principles of leadership while operating within a system designed to support them!

I believe that the world would be a very different place.

Whilst the community engagement movement appears to have excellent representation (if not over-representation) of women and a definite alignment to these principles, I can’t help but feel we are attempting to glue-on the concept of listening, connecting, and collaborating with communities to a system that has been designed for the total opposite of this, bar the four-yearly democratic voting process. I also spend much time wondering if our ‘softer’ feminine driven skill sets are what’s holding our community engagement sector back from shouting from the rooftops about our importance.

Further, I firmly believe that community engagement (certainly in Australia during the last two decades) has become stale and boring: a corporatised, bureaucratic process with stagnant top-down, expert-driven, exclusionary approach. Governments regularly miss the mark. As I said before, we are in an emergency. A complete reconceptualisation of community engagement is desperately needed. It must be a process that connects deeply with people, that supports honest and productive collaboration, is driven by communities themselves, and genuinely influences the decisions made and the resulting outcomes in neighbourhoods.

To achieve this radical breakthrough, awareness must be our first principle, just as awareness is the first principle for a dancer. We must unapologetically highlight an awareness of the needs of our broader communities at every level. As a matter of urgency, we must exercise our pragmatic muscles in the service of a deep and committed collaboration. Nothing less than this concerted effort is necessary so we can achieve the healthy, thriving communities I care about so passionately, and that our world so desperately needs.

Conversation Starters

 WHO were the political leaders during your childhood? What impacts did they make on society? How did they affect your outlook on your life or your career?

 WHAT does community engagement mean to you? How do you define it?

 WHY does community engagement interest you? What sparked that interest?

 WHEN we look to the future, what effects do you think the current political and/or societal climate, either locally or globally, is likely to have on children and young people as they embark on their career paths? Will what they are experiencing now affect how they interact with their communities? If yes, how?

 WHERE do you see signs of distrust within your own communities, or communities where you work? As a society, how can we work towards building more trust and sustainable trust?