If you work in community participation and engagement, you can get quite sensitive to questions about exploitative or coercive practices. Me, if I get the chance to have my coercion-ometer tested or recalibrated, I'm gonna take it.
And that happened unexpectedly today when I had the privilege to chair the first trustees meeting for Friends Out There. We have some way to go as a new charity, but I found myself among friends with energy, ideas, vision and practical nous, so I'm hoping we'll be able to convert the goodwill and excitement of our launch into some meaningful change.
We met in someone's house and several of the trustees had children with them. Some of the youngsters took the initiative to set up their own Friends Out There 'club'. We're talking roughly 8-12 year-olds. So they got on with their own meeting, in the kitchen - prepared an agenda, took notes, designed posters, listed ideas, and agreed to rotate roles at future meetings.
While this was exciting and to be welcomed, I'm of the view that on a sunny spring sunday afternoon, kids should have the chance to be outside messing around, making a noise and possibly causing a limited amount of trouble. So it forced us to examine the hidden sources of coercion. What had any of us said or done that brought the children to think they should be, or wanted to be doing this?
Maybe I seem a little over-sensitive here, but given the association of our charity with a village in Nigeria, I took no comfort whatever in recollecting the image of the philanthropic Mrs Jellyby in Bleak House. Dickens at his most devastating. Mrs Jellyby is devoted to the welfare of the natives of Borrioboola-Gha, on the left bank of the Niger, neglecting the interests of those around her. Her daughter Caddy comes to resent her exploitation by her mother.
I'm glad to say we all felt that the youngsters had taken their own path and in fact, before the meeting, one had complained to her mother that she wasn't being involved.
Still there we were in the back room, us adults, busy with Grown-Up Stuff, sigh. We invited the children to come into our meeting when they were ready and share with us what they'd done. How right-on of us.
Well, I suppose we think we understand involvement and we think we appreciate our young people, but they near blew us away with the creative directness of their ideas and approach. We now have the hefty challenge of working out how to support the stuff they want to see happen. The suspicion is growing that they might just be coercing us.
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