Monday, 27 February 2006

Community leaders?

When I read the term 'community leaders' I usually reach for a fully-loaded rolled-up tabloid, but my former colleagues at CDF, Mel Bowles and Michael Pitchford, have come up with a paper on 'communities and leadership,' based on a debate last October, which probes some interesting issues.

It includes some useful insights for example into how some activists become media-made, and on the gulf between people's neighbourhood experience and the scope of local authority administrative units. The paper serves as background for a forthcoming seminar in Birmingham on 8 March, 'How do we create dialogue for meaningful decision-making?' - details here.

Nothing in Mel and Michael's paper convinces me of the justification for using the term 'leaders,' but here it is again in a paper from Living Streets on 'Empowering communities to run their streets.' It's based on a seminar before christmas that I failed to get to (summary and full transcript available here).

What Living Streets does best is probably generating energy, and you have to read beyond the unfortunate abuse of the 'c' word and uncritical notions of 'leadership' to appreciate that there is quite a range of people starting to get quite worked up about community involvement. This even led to one speaker suggesting a 'Royal Commission on how local communities might govern themselves.'

The puzzling thing is not so much what the topic has to do with royalty, as the notion that in this country, if we can't quite get localism right we opt for a top-down deliberation of the establishment to ponder it.

Also in the transcript, I liked this - Robert Wheway, consultant and researcher on children’s play, commented:

"I find it incredible that we’ve got this far without mentioning that the thing that disempowers communities and neighbourhoods the most is the car travelling through neighbourhoods."

27 Feb 2006 22:30:45 | Governance and participation

The comments to this entry are closed.

NEXT POST
Stories of home, performed in houses London Bubble Theatre is performing My Home, a piece of verbatim theatre that tells the true stories of people who have travelled from Poland, Somalia, Kurdistan and Vietnam to make London their home, using their own words. The audience will experience contrasting perceptions of ‘home' as they move from room to room within a house. My Home will tour to four houses and flats in London, 13 March to 13 April 2006. Venues in Tower Hamlets, Sidcup, Purley and Camberwell, various times and dates. Via the newsletter of Welcome to your Library. I'm touched because I can remember the Bubble Theatre back in the 1970s, maybe it was earlier... (Exit slowly stage left with slippers and pipe...)
PREVIOUS POST
The problem of scale: neighbourhoods and participation For some time, thoughts have been churning in my mind about neighbourhood size and the scales at which we try to work. Then last night I was permitted a little insight, because I had the chance to hear Anthony Kelly talking about development practice. Anthony works for Oxfam Australia and was passing through London, so Shared Intelligence grabbed him for a seminar. I think he spoke for over an hour but I was almost resentful when he stopped, because so much of what he shared about the experience of development in the south is pertinent to urban community development in England. Among numerous messages, the key one for me has to do with distinguishing participatory development from service delivery. The lesson from development practice is that “services never get inside the vicious poverty cycle enough to break it… As a mechanism of breaking the poverty cycle it is the participatory methodologies that must take centre stage.” Here’s how Anthony presents some of the differences – According to Kelly, one of the most important insights in participatory development is the realisation that ‘communities’ and even interest groups within communities, are typically too large to deal with the structural and embedded inequalities of gender, race, class, caste and so on. The solution in Asia was to work with small groups and to give them the status of an organisation “but without all the legal and social responsibilities that come with formal organisations.” And the next step was to appreciate that such a ‘people’s organisation’ (PO) was not just a project under the umbrella of a registered organisation, but an organising structure in its own right. So how large are these POs? A maximum of twenty, Anthony says, usually around 12, simply because of the arithmetic. At that scale, because what you do is relationship-based and not role-based, there are 190 relationships going on, so it’s very complex. Among the findings that I imagine most community development workers would recognise in Anthony’s reflections, I was struck to recognise this: “comparatively few people can move from operating successfully in a peoples’ organisation, to take up the wider interests and responsibilities attached to a community organisation.” It was also apparent to me, listening to his account of the relationship between the service orientation and participatory development, that too much of our UK community sector is getting sucked into the delivery service paradigm; and that we get into confusions because we look to establish participation at the same scale as service delivery. We somehow assume that the same values, terms of engagement and democratic style should apply. All this helps to begin to explain, for me, what I believe to be a mismatch between our governance structures and the way people experience their neighbourhoods. Meanwhile, I’ve been trying to understand why my perception of how large a neighbourhood is, should differ sharply from some uses of the term. For myself, my neighbourhood is fourteen units. Paul Hilder, in his paper on Seeing the wood for the...

Kevin Harris

Search

My Other Accounts

Recent Comments