Sunday, 25 January 2009

Left, shoes

Two pairs of shoes 2 A wet day. In car parks and lay-bys, dogwalkers and allotment users sit in their cars and exchange their muddy boots for shoes.

Usually they take them with, when they leave.

25 Jan 2009 18:17:40 | Vignettes

1 Comment

Oh dear, it's rare to see an abandoned pair of shoes.

Posted by: Ingrid Koehler | Monday, 26 January 2009 at 12:48

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Talking about hope Hope is exactly the kind of psychological resource you probably don't give much thought to if you who don't need it. I've just learned a little about how much it matters to refugees and homeless people. My colleague Linda Constable and I spent some time helping to run a living library session at Crisis in London the other day, and it was an absolute blast. About a dozen members of the Crisis English Club put themselves forward as 'Books' to talk about their experiences; the 'Borrowers' were mostly Crisis staff and volunteers, gaining insights into how the process might work for the organisation elsewhere. The pic shows the engaging Kazem, a Lebanese refugee who gave his book title as Homelessness, hopelessness and hope. Another described himself like this: ‘I became an alcoholic with my wife after becoming homeless and destitute. I am very proud because for ten years now I haven’t had a drink.’ We learned something else. When the Books were being briefed by our contact at Crisis, she said she expected them to hold back from talking about the more disturbing and harrowing experiences in their lives. On the contrary: every one of them took the considered opportunity to willingly discuss those central life-disrupting episodes and their lasting effects. Such is the power of this simple device. Previous posts on Living Library.
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Informal influences on local social capital I love these little coincidences. This afternoon I was sitting in the final plenary at an international conference on community cohesion run by the British Council and iCoCo in Manchester. Just before Runnymede Trust director Rob Berkeley stood up to speak, an email from Communities and Local Government plopped into my mailbox offering figures released from the 2008-09 Citizenship Survey: '76 per cent of people feel that they strongly belong to their neighbourhood with 81 per cent of people satisfied with their local area as a place to live.' Presumably unaware of this news, although quite possibly already informed about some of the survey findings, Rob reflected quietly on the need to bring some refinement to the evaluation and measurement of cohesion and belonging: 'I live in south London. If my neighbours don't break down the door, I think we're getting on pretty well. In a rural village, if someone doesn't turn up to the fete, their neighbours might think relations have completely broken down. We do need to think about the different ways people think about belonging.' This echoes a point I made in my own presentation yesterday, consolidating a strong sub-theme of the conference, which was best expressed in a comment by Haroon Saad, director of QeC-Eran (Quartiers en Crise). First, in his presentation, he observed that: 'Intercultural dialogue is taking place on Facebook' (I think he meant social media in general) 'and what's significant is that it's dissociated from institutions.' Then in a discussion about how agencies were still trying to deal with tensions between local factions in Northern Ireland, Haroon said: 'What organisations are doing pales into insignificance compared with what's going on in the informal sector.' And that's it: sooner or later policy makers and cohesion practitioners are going to have to get to grips with informal social relations, because everything else we do is not enough. Ciara Wells, deputy director of CLG's Communities and Faiths Division, spoke on Wednesday about the ongoing work on meaningful interaction. Substituting for one of her colleagues, I followed it up with some points about neighbourliness, home zones and neighbourhood online networks, contrasted with reflections on the slightly more organised, formal occasions of street parties and living library. Devices like steet parties and living library justifiably generate a lot of interest, because they legitimise conversations that otherwise probably would not take place. But ultimately they're artificially constructed occasions, and however transformational the experiences they stimulate, it's hard to see how they can trump all the informal influences on local social capital. I very much welcome CLG's commitment to further work on meaningful interaction, and I hope it will be seen as an opportunity to develop some more nuanced understandings of the sense of belonging, the importance of trivial encounters, and the value of social networks. Previously: On superficial neighbourhood relations Enter the official local handyman

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