Friday, 20 April 2012

Why engage?

I liked this note from a New Start magazine article on the Turning the Corner (TTC) project, a Big Lottery funded series of initiatives working with young people in parts of northern England.

“In Wakefield, Pav Sull, owner of Woodhouse Post Office, has reported a marked reduction in antisocial behaviour in and around his premises since getting involved in artwork projects with young people and volunteering at local youth drop-in sessions.

“Pav says: ‘One reason for getting involved was so that when young people came in the store they would see their work on display and generate a sense of pride. We hoped this would translate into better behaviour, which it did. I have seen a drastic reduction in the anti-social behaviour compared to before TTC was set up. I have also noticed a vast improvement in the attitudes of the young people that come into the shop.’”


20 Apr 2012 19:42:43

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‘He seemed just a normal bloke’: resilience, community protection, and neighbouring Recently I mentioned two examples of public services (fire and rescue, trading standards) not usually associated with community engagement. This morning I was in a discussion about similar questions, the role of local people in readiness for, and response to disasters and emergencies. This is mainly about communication to and from the ‘resilience’ agencies which have to deal with the effects of explosions, rail accidents, flooding and so on. They are rightly looking to strengthen their contacts so that they can introduce timely voluntary and statutory support – like dealing with trauma for instance – which can be needed for months and years after a devastating event. And this is progress. But it struck me that in some kinds of human-initiated emergency, such as marauding use of firearms typified by the currently newsworthy Anders Behring Breivik, or the Hungerford massacre or Virginia Tech - or even the urban disturbances of summer 2011 - the experience of local people may be complicated by a sense of guilt mixed with cruel deception. Whenever cases like this arise, neighbours are usually quoted as saying something like ‘he seemed just a normal bloke, kept himself to himself…’ Can we understand how it felt in retrospect to have been a neighbour of Josef Fritzl, and to have respected his privacy?’ I imagine people saying simply, We knew nothing, what should we have done? – and never really recovering. An anti-social or deranged individual determined to use privacy as a smokescreen will do so, unless as a society we were to dismantle the structures and culture of privacy. (Apparently because of privacy laws, staff at Virginia Tech were not aware that their student Seung-Hui Cho had been disagnosed with selective mutism, and a severe anxiety disorder). Is this where we find the limit of community engagement? How close could the best of good neighbourliness have got to an Anders Breivik or a Josef Fritzl? No closer than they’d let you, through a street rep scheme perhaps, and no closer. You cannot see what he brings home from the stores in boxes or the magazines going through the letterbox, or what he views online. So what is the community engagement offer to the agencies which have to respond and clean up? Yes, they can inform residents and raise awareness about how to be prepared and how to react. (In Olympic year here in the south east of England, the phrase ‘marauding terrorist firearms attack’ is now established in official terminology). And they can certainly establish potentially-critical connections through voluntary agencies and neighbourhood groups. But for some kinds of spectacular events such as those envisaged and partly fulfilled by Breivik, if responsible social codes and connections are not in place at an early age, and intensive recovery and support for those who experience abuse (think Fred West. Or maybe, no, don’t) are not secured, we will know nothing until the alarm goes. And that, surely, is the key: not just early intervention but a cultural focus on healthy,...
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Reality checks A few days ago I went back to listen to a BBC Woman’s Hour programme from before Christmas which had an article about neighbourliness. It included a conversation with Helen Hibberd, Co-ordinator of Chorlton Good Neighbours (which I’ve mentioned recently) and Liz Richardson, from Manchester University, who I think I can get away with calling the doyenne of community action research. One of the points that Liz was making was that people seem to want to be more friendly with their neighbours but feel shy and say there are things that inhibit them from ‘making the first move’ – echoing Lilian Linders’ research finding about ‘the request scruple’: the problem is on the demand side, not the supply side. As it happens I bumped into Liz at a meeting in London on Friday, and she told me that when she got home from the recording studio on the day the programme was made, she found there was a serious brawl going on in the street outside her house. For all the soullessness of contemporary neighbouring in some contexts, to which she had referred in her broadcast comments, here was a violent and bloody fight going on in the street. But, Liz assured me, the neighbours rallied round, saw off the attackers and cared for the wounded victim. Which reminded me of my own reality check, when talking about neighbourliness to camera a few years ago and finding that local kids were throwing stones at us. It would be better not to have such incidents, but at least they help stop some of us getting soppy about ‘community’ and neighbourly relations.

Kevin Harris

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