Читать книгу For the Love of Community Engagement - Becky Hirst - Страница 8

If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.

― African Proverb, source unknown

The Gloucester Leisure Centre was where I learned to swim as a child. I hated swimming lessons and have nothing but terrible memories of clinging onto the side for dear life, whilst my best friend Laura clung on for her dear life right alongside me.

That’s not to say my memories of the place are bad, however. The vending machines in the cafeteria stocked delicious little rainbow popcorn snacks. As a teenager, I took the pilgrimage to the Centre to have my ears pierced in the beauty salon, as well as countless visits to the now-illegal-in-many-countries tanning beds. The local nightclub, Fifth Avenue, was located under the same roof. I have some dubious memories of it. And in earlier years when the club was called Cinderella’s, I remember going along to watch my Mum and her friends doing their 1980s-style, lycra-clad, daytime aerobics in there.

In 1992, I spent a week at the Gloucester Leisure Centre doing my work experience for school, splitting my time hanging out with the lifeguards, on reception, and with the maintenance team. I was fascinated by the concept of a place that offered so many different leisure functions for community. By far my favourite job during that week was sitting in the key exchange booth by the swimming pool, swapping locker keys for rubber wristbands to be worn by swimmers. I enjoyed witnessing firsthand a building as a community of place, providing facilities for communities of interest, ranging from swimmers, to gymnasts, and everyone in-between.

During my time in the health promotion department, I’d heard murmurs that as part of the rebuilding of this city-based Leisure Centre during 2001, there would be a new exciting partnership between the owners of the Centre, the Gloucester City Council, my current employers, the West Gloucestershire Primary Care Trust and the University of Gloucestershire. And that the initiative, to be called the Living and Learning Centre, would need a manager.

The timeline for applying for the Living and Learning Centre Manager’s role wasn’t ideal. The advertisement went live in mid-December 2001, and I was in the midst of getting ready for my fast-approaching New Year’s Eve wedding. But I was so excited and intrigued by the potential of this role that I managed to get my application in by the end of January and won the job. Funny though, some of the criticism hurled at me by my now ex-husband during our marriage breakdown a couple of years later was that I’d spent time during our honeymoon (lying on a sun lounger in Phuket), writing my application for this job. Hey, a girl’s got to do what a girl’s got to do. Right? And I’m not the type to kick back with a copy of Hello magazine, whatever the occasion!

Despite the awkward timing of the application process, the timing of my recruitment was impeccable, as I was on board and ready to roll from before the Leisure Centre opened. The partners were keen to have me as an integral part of the Leisure Centre management team. Each week, we would visit the building-site Centre, wearing plastic coverings over our shoes to protect the immaculate flooring, to follow the progress on the build. I felt so proud and excited for Gloucester. It was a 15-million-pound investment in physical infrastructure, but it was also an investment in our health and leisure.

This place was a state-of-the-art Centre, with stunning features, such as a national short course 8-lane 25-metre competition pool (with an incredible moveable floor to alter its depth for different events); a separate 25-metre training pool, learner pool and children’s water play area; indoor bowls, a fully fitted out gymnastics training hall; a martial arts hall, a three-storey health and fitness centre; badminton courts; a major, eight-court sports hall with a capacity to be a 1,600 seater entertainment venue, plus a beauty salon, a bar, and a café. It was the ‘bee’s knees’ of leisure centres! I treasured the opportunity to work alongside the other managers, learning all about the operations of a huge Leisure Centre.

The Living and Learning Centre was on the ground floor, close to the main reception, opposite the café, and at the entrance to the Horizons health club area, where people would come for the gym, exercise classes, or to have a sauna. The Living and Learning Centre was a small space, probably no bigger than fifty square metres, and in those early days, I had great fun planning the furniture, with my tiny budget. I ended up creating zones within the small space so that, in the true spirit of the partnership, the Living and Learning Centre could be used for a multitude of offerings.

Cathy Daley was the overall manager of the Leisure Centre, now called GL1. She was my day-to-day line manager. I had a lot of respect for her because of her straight-talking ability to make things happen. Early on, I remember hearing her explain that, whilst this all-singing-all-dancing, state of the art Leisure Centre was in inner city Gloucester, surrounded by a low socioeconomic demographic of residents who probably most needed a healthier lifestyle, the majority of users of the Centre would be the more affluent residents of Gloucester (who would drive in from the outer suburbs of town to use our facilities). Whilst Cathy didn’t mind this from a business perspective, from a social perspective this didn’t sit well with her, particularly given this was a public leisure centre and not a private health club. She explained that her priority was to connect with the immediate local community.

From the perspective of the University, based in the neighbouring and much more upper-class town of Cheltenham, this was an opportunity to connect with the people of Gloucester. Using this unique setting, Jane, my manager from the University, was keen to promote a message of lifelong learning and to demystify some of the pomp and ceremony associated with University. Having recently studied there myself, and having spent plenty of my childhood attending lectures with my Mum as a mature-aged student, I had a strong connection with the organisation and was excited by the challenge.

The third partner, the West Gloucestershire Primary Care Trust, saw this as an opportunity to promote healthy living messages to the users of GL1. And, as with Cathy, my health promotion manager, Sue specifically focussed on immediate neighbours living in the lower socioeconomic areas surrounding the Centre.

I could soon see that the coming together of Cathy, Jane, and Sue in this form of strategic partnership was going to be significant. And even more significant for me was that they were willing to trust me to guide the evolvement of the Living and Learning Centre as I saw fit. Whilst each of them had investment, both financially and in interest (an annual £15,000 per organisation to cover my salary and a small operating budget). They trusted me with the briefs they gave me and allowed me to run with it.

As a consultant nowadays, it’s rare that I get an open-ended brief, although I encourage my clients to let me guide them through a process without a specific end in mind. These occasions are often the ones that result in the most creative, innovative, and high-performing solutions. In community engagement, this approach is critical: we must trust in communities to evolve during an engagement process, on their terms, using their skills and knowledge.

GL1 opened to the public on the 12 August 2002, and the Centre’s adventure began! Summarised as a centre to promote health, leisure and learning to local residents, it acted as both a drop-in venue but also a base for which a range of outreach programs occurred: always in partnership with others.

We partnered with the health service to run support groups for pregnant women wanting to stop smoking. We partnered with local career advisor to run a Live the Life You Want workshop. For Stroke Awareness Week, we welcomed 26 older people to drop-in for blood pressure checks. And, as part of the Strolling in Gloucestershire Festival and Adult Learners Week, we hosted a guided walk about the historic city. Working collaboratively with Black and Minority Ethnic community groups, we undertook tours of GL1, focusing on the women-only swim sessions. We established strong, ongoing partnerships with organisations such as the Education Achievement Zone, Sure Start, ACET (Adult Continuing Education and Training), the Information, Advice and Guidance Partnership, local surgeries and the Library Service.

One of the big success stories of those early months was the Family Learning Weekend, called Live It Up, which involved a range of organisations working together with the Centre to offer a range of activities for local families. I have a vague recollection of the event involving free swim sessions, career advice, and ‘have-a-go-at-kickboxing’ sessions.

One memory stands out: the incredibly popular ‘Meet a Rugby Player’ session. We worked together with Gloucester Rugby Club to host a brilliant event with two of their popular players, shown in image 8. The event won a national award from the Campaign for Learning, noting its innovation in combining health, education and leisure promotion and connection to community. The following year, we ran another event as part of Family Learning Week that we called Step Back in Time, and installed Victorian-styled classrooms for local children to experience, with an actor playing a very strict Victorian-era teacher.

Image 8 - Living it Up at GL1’s Family Learning Weekend with Chris Catlin and Thinus Delport, who played for the Gloucester Rugby Club at the time. Photo by author, 2002.

One of my favourite, fun and creative memories of the work of the Centre was planning and implementing a Valentine’s Day initiative. Love poetry was displayed on all the public café tables for the week to promote reading. The local Library Service’s Reader in Residence attended to recite poetry to people between the ages of 14 and 25, aiming to promote reading specifically to this age group.

Art was a big feature of my time at the Centre. With the Primary Care Trust, we worked with graphic design and multimedia students from Gloucestershire College of Arts & Technology to deliver an exhibition for No Smoking Day in 2004. That year’s theme was ‘for smokers who want out’. The students created artwork to illustrate why two thirds of adult smokers wanted to quit smoking. The artwork had a powerful impact and its placement in a Leisure Centre reached a different demographic than would normally attend an art exhibition (or potentially a more traditional health service). Another initiative saw us working with Leo Saunders, a local ‘fusion’ artist, who mixed media such as photography, paint and screenpaint, to install a stunning exhibition of his work in the main GL1 reception area. The exhibition gained plenty of media coverage, as well as raised eyebrows, attracting some not-your-usual-suspects into the Centre.

The somewhat hedonistic lifestyle of working in the leisure and pleasure industry, as it was aptly nicknamed by colleagues (recognising the long out-of-office-hours working in a venue where the majority of people spent their spare time), gave me the escape I needed from my already failing marriage. It provided the essential support I needed when my marriage ended. I built some great friendships during my time at GL1. There I learned the true meaning of having a ‘work family’.

It also convinced me of the potential of partnerships – both at a strategic level and operational level. The Living and Learning Centre would have been nothing without those partnerships.

Conversation Starters

 WHO would you like to see proactively working together in your workplace or communities?

 WHAT partnerships have you been involved with? This can be personal or professional! What did you learn from the experience? How can you use what you learned during this experience to form strong partnerships in the future?

 WHY collaborate? What benefits might collaboration bring?

 WHEN have you witnessed great things being achieved by people, groups or organisations working together?

 WHERE have you seen significant financial investment in infrastructure happen in your communities? Were you interested or involved in it? If yes, did you have much influence over the process? If no, what stopped you being interested or getting involved?