For the Love of Community Engagement. Becky Hirst
performance reviews; with politicians when they’re door-knocking asking for votes; with children at the dinner table; with lecturers at university; with friends over coffee. With everyone!
To encourage this critical change, at the end of each chapter I pose some Conversation Starters to be used as prompts for discussion. The questions are based on the five Ws - who, what, why, when, and where - to provide a range of opportunities for contemplation about people, purpose, places, and the timing of community engagement. They will challenge the bureaucrat to reconnect with their inner citizen and challenge the citizen or local person to consider their connection to the powers that be. These Conversation Starters are a combination of different calls to action for the reader to both reflect and act.
I dedicate this book to my friend and fellow engagement geek, the late Mellita Froiland, née Kimber, whom I first met and worked with in the Community Engagement Team at the Children, Youth & Women’s Health Service in Adelaide back in 2008. In September 2020, she was taken from us, too soon, far too quickly, and way too young. In her final weeks, Mellita and I chatted via SMS about our shared eagerness to make the most out of the short time we have on this Earth. We both admitted that we never really stop unless it’s to reflect on how we’d learn from what we just did to make our next venture even better.
Mellita was also described as ‘the real deal’ by the people she worked with. When her brother made the tragic announcement that she had died, he suggested that we all carry forward Mellita’s zest, energy, and passion for a good life by continually asking ourselves, ‘What would Mellita do?’
I am certain that Mellita would encourage me to tell my story in this way, to inspire others to be the change we want to see in the world: more high-quality and totally awesome community engagement.
For the love of community engagement.
1. Understand community engagement within the context of society
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