Category Archives for "Community Development"

1 How to Use Models

One key skill development workers need is how to use models. They are in practice mentors for activists. So, they need to know how to read the situation in a neighbourhood to support local activists. This is the fourth post about these four topics:

If I were mentoring a development worker or activist and suggested a model that might apply to their work, I would monitor how the worker or activist used the model.

Not all models are in words. They can be pictures, maps, photos and even 3D models.

Models can be seductive and when they seduce us, we surrender our critical faculties to them.  The model becomes prescriptive.

Models are better understood as descriptive.  They help the development worker look at and understand what is happening in their community.  Models do not and should not tell the worker what to do.  What workers do should come out of the conversations they have with local residents and conversations can be informed by a model.

Models Generate Questions

Perhaps a worker might use a model to generate questions about what is going on in the neighbourhood.  The conversations generated by these questions can be inspiration for the worker and for activists.

If a model suggests an organisation in most successful communities carries out a particular function, it does not mean your community needs a new organisation to carry out that function.  In conversation you may find the function happens in ways not immediately obvious.  Or you may find an entirely different approach that works around the lack of the function locally.

Models inspire conversations and so generate new, home-grown ideas.  Remember, nothing should be attempted just because it worked somewhere else.  Maybe the way the other community generated their idea is what you need to copy.

Leave a comment if you have experienced positive or negative use of models.  Maybe you have introduced an idea from somewhere else and it worked!

Next time, I’ll introduce my key model.  It pulls together many of the issues I’ve covered so far.

1 On the Scarcity of Mentors

In two previous Wednesday posts, I suggested the basic elements that lead to successful local activism include the systematic practice of running meetings and the principles of mutuality. In the nineteenth century, if people needed to start a co-op or similar organisation, they would ask someone with experience for support. This is a mentoring role and ideally the role of community development workers, who themselves also need mentors. So, I’m onto the third of these four topics:

I reckon it took me 20 years to learn how to be an effective development worker.  I’m sure it would have been a lot less had mentors been available.

Mentoring in Community Development

Chiron and Achilles c1922-1925 John Singer Sargent. Centaurs: the first recorded mentors according to Greek mythology.

I know many development workers share my experience; indeed many don’t stay in the work for long because they do not have the support they need.  Local authorities and churches usually appointed development workers, dropped them into a community, offered little or no support and then blamed when things go wrong.  It happened to me and I can remember many others treated in the same way.  Things always go wrong.  Development work is about knowing what to do when things go wrong.  Self-blame or blaming others is never anything like an effective solution.  Problems that should be seen as a stimulating challenge become a major trauma that can take years to process.

The support of a mentor is essential in these situations.  Someone experienced and distant from the situation can make a world of difference.  And they can support not only the inexperienced worker but also workers with many years experience.  When immersed in a situation, it is easy to lose perspective.  An experienced worker knows when they are losing perspective and so when they need support from someone with an independent view.

Where are the Mentors?

Community development has never had a career structure and so the employer often has no way of knowing how much experience and insight the person they appoint has or how to support them.  They leave the employee to find their own way.  Encounters at conferences and through local groups of workers help but offer limited support.  It’s not easy when it feels like a request for help is to admit to not being adequate for the job (it’s actually a part of doing the job) and so there is a steady attrition of workers, frustrated by the lack of support and the lack of career structure and low-income.

In England, we have seen a catastrophic decline in community development.  Local Authorities no longer appoint them and churches have moved onto other things.  This can be attributed to the lack of career structure, which means experienced workers move into other fields, leaving no-one with authority to argue the case for development work or to provide support.

And so we contemplate the period between the seventies, when the need for development workers was first identified, through to the beginning of the twenty-first century when the idea was all but abandoned.  This is the theme of my e-book, “Community Development is Dead! Long Live Community Development!”.  There’s no charge for it and you can download it at the end of this post.

How to Respond

The decline of community development is a pity but there is a wealth of experience out there that would help development workers and activists if only it were available.  So, my aim is to build an online community committed to sharing good practice and encouraging new ways of doing the work.

We need to re-learn the roles of mentors for activists and for development workers.

Use the comments to tell your story about poorly supported development work.

Why do you think community development workers never developed a career structure?

Is community development dead?  If not, who is doing it now?

If you need help finding a mentor, you could talk with me.  I offer a free consultancy session where I help you work out the support you need.

2 Beatrice Potter, Development Worker?

Last time, I described how meetings once empowered participants, generating massive change in the UK. What we experience today as a tedious chore was once key to social change. What has gone wrong? To understand this we need to look at the second of four topics, key to understanding community development:

This is the story of my hero, perhaps an early development worker – EV Neale, Edward Vansittart Neale.   He was a barrister during his working life and a member of the Christian Socialist Movement during its first incarnation in the middle of the nineteenth century.   He drew up the first Industrial and Provident legislation, which to this day governs co-operatives and Working Mens’ Clubs in the UK.

Upon his retirement at the age of 65, he was appointed President of the Co-operative Union and remained so until the end of his life, 18 years later.  He grew a bushy white beard and became what was known as a GOM, a Grand Old Man.

Every year at their AGM, he gave an inspirational speech about the potential of the co-operative movement.  He visited many European worker co-ops and they convinced him they were the way forward for working people.  Every year he received a standing ovation for his inspirational speech.

Every year his great rival JTW Mitchell – President of the Co-operative Wholesale Society – reported on the growth of the wholesale co-op sector.  Growth was steady but hardly inspirational.  But people went home and carried on building retail co-ops, in practice ignoring Neale’s speeches.

Beatrice Potter (later Webb)

Neale’s nemesis was a young woman called Beatrice Potter.  She was a reporter and listened to his speeches.  She did her own research and concluded worker co-ops were a non-starter.  Look, she said, the interests of workers and consumers are opposed.  Workers want to drive prices up and consumers want to cut them.  The retail co-ops were very good at the latter which meant that income from wages tended to be reduced.

She argued Trade Unions were better placed to represent the interests of workers and so the new Labour Party (we’re in the early years of the twentieth century now) should be allied with the Unions and not the Co-ops.

For those of you hoping for Peter Rabbit or Mrs Tiggywinkle, I’m afraid this Beatrice Potter is the one who married Sydney Webb and is better known as the redoubtable (always wanted to use that word) Beatrice Webb.  Together they founded the Labour Party.

So, Neale’s ideas were side-lined and in time we lost track of mutuality as a value underlying our economy.  In the 1980s, carpetbaggers led a campaign to demutualise many of our building societies and other financial institutions.  So, now in England they are mostly forgotten and frequently not understood.

Potter’s approach may have been the right one for its time. At the time, large employers employed most workers and so it made sense to organise the workforce. The trade union spirit was essentially mutual, although perhaps more confrontational than the retail co-ops. The challenge for any community development worker or movement is to ask how we can find our way back to co-operative principles.

How did working people support development of mutuals in the nineteenth and early twentieth century?

2 Meetings, Meetings, Meetings

Last time I introduced four key topics to illustrate the differences between activism and development work.

Meetings may seem an odd place to start.  But consider the standard meeting.  You know the drill –

I’ve sat through enough meetings to know it’s easy to make heavy weather of them.  Dull meetings with lots of procedures, mastered by a few activists, are not only boring but also dis-empowering.  Their purpose is to exercise power and control.

The Meeting as a Powerhouse

Where did this style of meeting come from?  I’m no historian and I would be delighted if anyone can prove me wrong but I think it was the eighteenth century evangelical revival!

Portrait of John Wesley by Frank O Salisbury

John Wesley organised the new industrial poor.  I don’t know where he got the model from but it seems this type of meeting was not generally known before him.

He passed his approach to the Methodist societies and their members passed them onto other organisations.  During the nineteenth century almost everyone used this approach to meetings, particularly among the working classes.  All sorts of local economic initiatives developed that helped people organise and make the most of their incomes, for example worker and retail co-ops, insurance companies, building societies, friendly societies, penny banks, sick and dividing clubs, libraries, educational institutions …  None of these would have been possible without Wesley’s approach to meetings.

Trade Unions organised in chapels, beginning meetings with a hymn and a prayer and were one type of organisation representing working class interests.  Others included non-conformist chapels, temperance halls and pubs.

What Went Wrong?

Meetings we experience today as dull were a powerhouse of innovation 100 – 200 years ago.

Why are meetings so often experienced as dis-empowering today?  With the welfare state (arguably the greatest achievement of this movement) and mass media, perhaps there was a decline in opportunity and purpose for the autodidact, the self-taught man or woman.

Maybe the rise of community development in the nineteen seventies, reflected this decline in innovative change from the working classes.  Perhaps we need to understand this change.

The point is meetings don’t have to be this way.  It is the role of the development worker to help activists organise participative and enjoyable meetings.  The role of the activist is to organise meetings, introduce topics, help people participate and follow-up once the meeting is complete.  The developmental role is watching how the meeting is organised and helping the activists improve their performance.

Throughout the nineteenth century, working people built the institutions we take for granted today.  I’ll tell you about one of the great debates of the time in my next post: Beatrice Potter, Development Worker?

One comment I’ve received refers to the “curse of structureless meetings”. Would you find a review of the purpose of the elements of a typical meeting helpful?

Do you think it is true there were no nineteenth century development workers because the people were able to organise themselves?  Or if there were development workers, where do we look for them?

1 Do we need a campaign for real community development?

Do you know why our neighbourhoods are poorly organised, how they can do better and how to promote real community development online?

You can read about how community development has lost its way in my free ebook, “Community Development is Dead!”.  Find out how to sign up for it at the end of this post. If you are in the UK, you’re sure to disagree about some things I write about.  So, write and tell me what you think! You can comment on the ebook by visiting the post I’ve provided for that purpose.  If you’re not based in the UK, please comment about how your country compares with community development in the UK.

The Central Role of Activist

This sequence of posts, complements the ebook.  I wrote it as an email sequence about a year ago.  My aim at the time was to share some practicalities.  What is real community development; the best way to support community activists?

Not everyone who works in the community is a community development worker.  There are other equally valuable roles; many agencies provide local workers in the community.  So, we need to be clear about what community development is and how it supports the other roles.

In the ebook I explain how we confuse the roles of activist and development worker at our peril! Activists need support from development workers and so confusing the two roles tends to devalue the work of activists. Community activists actually do the work and need the support of development workers.

So, I’ll start by exploring four topics, key to understanding community development and how it differs from the role of activists:

These might not look exciting but together they define some of the problems community development has encountered in the UK.  So next week it’s “Meetings, Meetings, Meetings” – won’t you be glad when they’re over?