Thursday, 20 December 2007

Refugees and libraries

Wtyl The Welcome to Your Library project, which worked on connecting public libraries and refugee communities in five areas around England, has come to an end.

The evaluation is primarily oriented towards library services, although it also points to some interesting case study material. Most strikingly, it suggests that, even in this outstanding project, the libraries' contribution to community cohesion cannot be described as embedded practice. The researchers note:

  • a pattern of delivery where services predominantly continue to be delivered “to” refugees rather than “with” them
  • conclusions from the refugee environmental testing exercise, which reported there were no visible signs of refugees being an integrated part of the overall library user group
  • rare examples of the project advocating on behalf of refugees and raising awareness in the wider community of refugees’ contribution to the community.

This comes across as negative but I think it's a clear indication of just how long some of this stuff takes. As we'd expect from the library sector, achievements in more 'internally focussed' themes, such as reading and learning, were more consistently embedded into practice.

One hopes the momentum from practical initiatives such as conversation clubs, when extended from refugee communities to the general public, will cause a significant benefit spillover. As usual, the message is 'we're not done yet.'

20 Dec 2007 09:41:20 | Cohesion and diversity, Information and communication

The comments to this entry are closed.

NEXT POST
Pavement chalking epidemic? I've just been reading some interview and survey material from a range of local residents who attended street parties, as part of a wee project I'm doing with Chris Gittins at Streets Alive. Let me share this extract with you: How do you get on with younger and/or older people in the street generally? Fine. Except someone in the street called the police about our 2 young children drawing with chalks on pavement outside our home. We actively want our kids to play in the street and were shocked and depressed by that attitude. This took place in a city in England. I have no more information and don't know if it took place during a street party or not. But it's an eerie echo of the story of the Brooklyn sidewalk-chalker who received an official fine - indeed it may pre-date that story. What next? In both instances, I'd have hoped the officials would have taken the time to make a point to the complainant, because it's in the authorities' interest that civil relations prevail, and it can't be hard to do that when there is no serious threat to anyone or to any property. I can remember when I was a kid, with siblings or friends, riding small bicycles up one end of our street invariably caused one particular older woman to step out her door and tell us to go away. Presumably, she wanted that portion of the planet over which she had some control to remain just so. Is that what drives this uncivil anti-neighbour nastiness? The poverty of generosity under which she existed must have been wretched. The idea that civil relations with the people who live around us is universally regarded as desirable seems to be simply false.
PREVIOUS POST
Eat local stuff and meet people The beeb covers an experiment with eating locally-produced food in Scotland, including a week's worth of the Fife Diet. The most difficult thing has been preparation time when cooking from raw ingredients. The most rewarding has been meeting people, and discovering what's available from your region. One implication that I particularly like, when this becomes more commonplace, is that we'll all recover a stronger sense of the changing seasons. For people whose only experience of the outdoors is the few metres between front door and car, and whose diet comes out of supermarket bags, that could be a shock worth watching.

Kevin Harris

Search

My Other Accounts

Recent Comments