For the Love of Community Engagement. Becky Hirst
I heard, particularly from people in metropolitan Adelaide, was repetitious. It didn’t matter whether my client was the health department asking me to seek contributions for a new policy, or a Council asking me to engage with people to design a new garden as part of the Adelaide parklands, or the Premier’s Department working on a new Strategic Plan for the entire State, people were telling me things that were deeply interlinked. Locating the common themes within a model based on the layers within Dahlgren and Whitehead’s Determinants of Health provided an ideal platform for my analysis and I put together the ‘Healthy Communities’ graphic below in Image 6.
Now, in 2021, I experience much joy (and equally much frustration) when I consider that these same matters are still being discussed by people in metropolitan Adelaide today. I bet this applies to the whole of the world. We have been talking about these issues for a long time.
The third and final big concept that inspired me during my Graduate Diploma studies was Maslow’s famous Hierarchy of Needs. When I studied Maslow’s model, it had not been the subject of as much scrutiny as it is today. I learned the basics and they really affected how I looked at my work – and my life. Maslow’s original Hierarchy of Needs built on my understanding and values that a person cannot reach their full potential if their basic needs are not met.
We cannot achieve self-esteem if we lack a feeling of belonging. We cannot feel like we belong without having our safety needs met. And before we have our safety needs meet, we need our basic physiological needs met. I’ve since learned that Maslow’s Hierarchy has been critiqued over the decades. And with good cause. I have a close friend who lost his livelihood and home in the last few years. Yet he still holds the ability to seek out deep learning, understanding, and self-awareness; often regularly helping others by way of a higher state of transcendence. This experience reminds me that the hierarchy is not necessarily as straightforward (or constraining) as it seems.
The model has also evolved over time to include cognitive, aesthetic, and transcendent needs, as shown in image 7.¹⁰ Not only did Maslow’s model further enrich my deep understanding, as did other models, providing a much deeper understanding of individuals and community, but it also reminded me of another of my passions in the world of community engagement… the basic need of a sense of belonging.
As with my fascination with a real-life game of Sim City and the relationships among everyone living in communities of place, in her book Belonging,¹¹ Toko-pa Turner notes that, as humans, we are remembering how to be an ecosystem. She suggests that we must look after each other, reconstituting the world through many small contributions, collaborations, and general sense of togetherness.
I believe that good community engagement not only contributes to considered decision-making (that in turn leads to thriving communities), but also when community engagement is done well, it can build a strong sense of belonging. Maslow’s model confirms as it was for me that feeling like you belong somewhere isn’t just a ‘nice-to-have’ feeling, but a critical need for our overall well-being as individuals.
Health promotion was good for me and I was good for it. I loved the food and health-related community projects. Working across the county of Gloucestershire meant traveling between meetings in the depths of the Forest of Dean with school principals to support establishment of breakfast clubs, to visiting the urban suburbs of Gloucester to work with Neighbourhood Projects setting up food cooperatives so local people could bulk buy staple food items. I loved my work establishing the Gloucestershire Food in Schools group, a multi-disciplinary collective of professionals who met regularly to work on healthy eating initiatives in schools. Membership ranged from school nurses to principals, to qualified nutritionists and local GPs. There I learned about the importance of people meeting regularly together to tackle a community issue.
I also participated in a fantastic multi-disciplinary team of health promotion specialists, learning about initiatives to reduce high teenage pregnancy rates, to programs about reducing sexually transmitted diseases. I was grateful to witness the exciting smoking cessation movement of fully trained Stop Smoking Advisors at the time being available to the public at no cost.
This era also provided an anchor for me in a rapidly changing world. By 2001, we had computers on our desks and had joined the twenty-first century! I revelled in being allowed to choose the colour of my office walls. I felt like a very modern professional. The joy of having my very own computer in my brightly painted office was tragically eclipsed by witnessing via my newly installed Internet, the collapse of the Twin Towers at the World Trade Centre in New York, on 11 September 2001.
That was the first I’d heard of Al-Qaeda. Sadly, it would not be the last. For our global community, that was a defining moment for me, as a young professional. Together, the global community witnessed an outpouring of love, support and camaraderie for America and beyond.
Conversation Starters
WHO could you be having a conversation with about something important: a person you haven’t yet had a conversation with?
WHAT fascinates you about communities? Is it the people? The infrastructure? The environment? Health needs? Housing? Or the whole ecosystem?
WHY is it important to put communities at the centre of everything we do? How can we do this better?
WHEN have you witnessed a community or communities demanding to be heard?
WHERE do you sit on the political spectrum? How does this affect your perception of communities and/or community engagement?
4. Form powerful partnerships
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,