Sunday, 01 June 2008

There is no substitute for intensive outreach

The other day I was at a BURA seminar on community engagement - with a fascinating mix from property development, regeneration, public affairs, housing, and a sprinkling of folk from the community sector.

And thank you Carolyn Clark from the Shoreditch Trust for this key statement in her presentation:

There is no substitute for intensive outreach, and it's a real skill.

It's a message that underpins community development, and we've struggled over the years to get people to understand it. Essentially, if you want to use policy measures in the interests of people who face social problems and injustices, you're not going to reach those who experience exclusion without some old-fashioned concentrated neighbourhood work, on the streets, meeting people, building trust and relationships, trying to connect them to others and to services. It's not easy, it's a slog.

But there aren't that many ways you can restate the message for those who won't hear it. So how do we create the conditions in which its value might be more obvious, so that policy makers recognise that's what's needed?

1 Jun 2008 21:28:46 | Governance and participation

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I hope you know what you're doing A few years ago I was in Brasilia and gave a seminar (about community cohesion as I recall) at the Education Ministry. Afterwards I was invited to meet a senior official who proudly told me about a new adult literacy campaign they were about to launch, bringing the alphabet and all its benefits to indian people across Amazonia. I was an honoured guest in the country of Freire, but I didn't feel I should desist from saying hesitantly, I hope you know what you're doing. I made direct reference to Walter Ong's remarkable Orality and literacy which explains how, once you bring literacy to an oral culture, that's it, you can't restore orality, not ever. Ong certainly convinced me, not that I needed convincing, that the most powerful technology humans have ever invented remains the alphabet, but we may not be very good at understanding quite how powerful it is. There's a map and list here of the indigenous languages of Brasil. If you scroll down you can see a selection with the word 'extinct' next to them. Yup, this is available globally using the written english language via the internet. I don't know what happened subsequently to the literacy campaign, but I do appreciate that the reasons for releasing these pics yesterday, taken by Funai, the Brasil National Indian Foundation, of an uncontacted tribe near the border with Peru, may be quite different. Hopefully they will help to spread the message that there is a moral responsibility to leave people alone. (I suppose I could try and tease out some ironies to do with the fact that I had been invited to Brasilia partly to talk about cohesion, and partly to talk about information technologies and inclusion...) And just to put this in even broader context, there's the History Channel's Life after people documentary, which somehow left me celebrating the prospect of the decline of our cultures.
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'Hard to reach'? Increasingly I seem to be hearing people blurting righteous objection to the phrase 'hard to reach.' Perhaps it's time to look at this a little more closely. The misuse of the term seems likely to give offense, but why exactly? Harriet Baldwin from English Partnerships, commenting at a BURA seminar the other day, got her audience smiling by describing how residents in a neighbourhood where she happened to be working told her it was she, not they, who was hard to reach - you have a secretary, you have an answer-phone, you have voicemail, you have email, but we can't speak to you. You're hard to reach. We're not. We live here, this is where you'll find us. Indeed. But this does not mean that there are not people who are hard to reach. It means that it is a mistake to refer to certain residents - most residents, especially those who are community activists - by that term. And it doesn't help to misuse the term to refer to people just because it requires a bit of an effort to make contact. I think there are people who are 'hard to reach' and who can be described as such. There are people who are isolated, not known even to their neighbours or to agencies, often suffering from illness or problems with their mental health, perhaps moving accommodation frequently or occasionally living homeless. There are people who live secretly in conditions of brutal oppression and violence. How easy to reach were the offspring of Josef Fritzl? If we deny that some people are hard to reach, are we not calling into question the rationale for the services designed to help them? If it is argued that the term is patronising, where does that leave you if you have to design and deliver services for people in great need, irrespective of their receptivity to that service? It matters to me that the society I live in can be compassionate towards people in need, and will make collective effort to extend resources to them so that their quality of life might be improved on their terms. I'm not sure that it helps to deny that there can be relative difficulties in getting those services to them. Maybe we need to be a little more scrupulous in our use of language.

Kevin Harris

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