For the Love of Community Engagement. Becky Hirst
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?
2. Give a voice to the underdog
There is no power for change greater than a community discovering what it cares about.
― Margaret J Wheatley⁵
I grew up in Abbeydale, a modern suburb within the cathedral city of Gloucester, in the south-west of England.
Abbeydale was next door to Matson. Matson was, and still is, a densely populated urban area of relatively high deprivation. The ‘new’ suburb of Abbeydale was caught in-between the established suburb of Matson and the village of Upton St Leonards, and my parents tell me it felt like a no-man’s-land when it was first developed in the late 1970s.
While Abbeydale was on the ‘wrong’ side of the M5 motorway to be truly part of the upmarket Upton St Leonards community, it was pretty much regarded that Matson was on the ‘wrong’ side of Painswick Road for Abbeydale folk to relate to.
But that’s not to say we didn’t connect with Matson. The beautiful little church I attended as a child stood high up on the hill above Matson. I have fond memories of visiting Matson library, and my older brother and sister attended an excellent primary school there. I also remember that Matson had one of the best fish and chip shops around! During my University years, I had a great time working as the Playleader at the Matson Playscheme, a six-week school holiday program for local children.
In 1999, after three years at university in northern England, I was offered a job interview in Matson. That definitely felt like coming home.
My Mum’s liberal socialist tendencies taught me to judge no one. From her I learned to be curious about people’s stories, regardless of where they lived or what they did for a living. She taught me to embrace the underdog. And Matson was my underdog. Just to be clear about my language here: I see an ‘underdog’ as a person or group in a competition, usually in sports and creative works, who is generally expected to lose. My Mum used the world of popular culture to make her point. She told me that Cliff Richard was way too ‘squeaky clean’ as a performer. She found much more joy in the nomadic, waistcoat-wearing David Essex. Mum’s popular culture analogy was later reflected in my teenage music choices. I always preferred the hard-edged, East London boys of East 17 to the more middle-class, pretty boys of Take That!
My love of underdogs continued into adulthood. I admire dancers such as Steve Paxton, who in 1970 legitimised ordinary movement as a dance medium,⁶ by having forty-two naked redheads walking across the stage, and calling it dance! And Isadora Duncan who was a self-styled revolutionary, becoming known as the Mother of Dance.⁷ Or stepping away from dance, in 2003, I loved it when magician and illusionist David Blaine spent over six weeks living on just water inside a plexiglass box, hanging thirty feet in the air on the banks of the River Thames. I even made a lone pilgrimage from Gloucester to London for the day to witness him doing just that, thinking to myself how much I admired his determination to do what he wanted, seemingly without worry about what anyone else would say.
In my bedroom I have a photo of Philippe Petit, a French high-wire artist, who famously undertook an unauthorised high-wire walk between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Centre in New York in 1974. His audacity inspires me no end!
Closer to home, and closer to my topic, my good friend Stephen Yarwood, whom I met just as he was announcing his intentions to nominate himself as a candidate for Lord Mayor of Adelaide in the 2010 local government elections, is one of my favourite underdogs. When we first met, he told me enthusiastically about how worn his boots were from walking the streets of Adelaide, door knocking potential voters. He was hearing loud and clear from the people he met that they intended to vote for him and felt quietly confident. Yet I remember watching a televised debate between the candidates when he barely got a look-in, as the media seemed to favour other more well-known candidates. I cheered with delight when Stephen, in my opinion, the underdog, won the election and served as Lord Mayor from 2010-2014, bringing a future thinking and urban planning approach that had rarely been experienced in Adelaide.
When I reflect on my admiration for these people, it’s their ability to think for themselves that I admire. They don’t try to conform and seemingly push against the tide of convention.
My parents were children of working-class families in the north of England. Mum’s relatives were heavily involved in the Jarrow March of 1936, an organised protest against unemployment and poverty in the English town of Jarrow at that time. All their lives, my parents worked incredibly hard, studying, working and in their home life. That gave their children what I’d call a privileged, middle-class upbringing. Nevertheless, their pride in their northern England working-class roots was not lost on us. While we accept that we are privileged, we are grounded and truly grateful.
This underdog affinity also applies to my brother, Richard. He is an assistant headteacher in a secondary school who, from early in his teaching career, had the challenge of teaching gritty, often socially disadvantaged students at government-funded state schools. There were less opportunities to teach the well-behaved, polished jolly-hockey-stick types he’d encounter if he’d taught in a private school. Whilst he admits he’d probably rather this scenario, to this day, his eyes light up when he explains the challenges of teaching disadvantaged students and how he loves helping them complete their education. Like me, he cheers on and supports the underdog, noting that the social disadvantage his career route has exposed him to has been very distant from our upbringing.
Nowadays, I consider many people who I meet through my work with government departments in delivering community engagement as underdogs. Whether it’s the truck driver turning up to a community workshop to passionately put forward his concerns about road safety; someone who feels strongly about the environmental impacts of a proposed housing development who’s trying to