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Anti-discrimination and Equality in Community Development Work

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Community development work is underpinned by a set of values.   The first of these centres on anti-discrimination and equality. According to Lifelong Learning, Community Development work ‘challenges structural inequalities and discriminatory practices.  It recognises that people are not the same, but they are all of equal worth and importance and therefore entitled to the same degree of respect and acknowledgement’.

This is a pretty radical position and one that is by no means self -evident.  ‘People are not the same, but they are all of equal worth and importance and therefore entitled to the same degree of respect and acknowledgement’. So a convicted killer is of the same worth and importance as a Nobel prize winner?  We should treat them both with the same degree of entitlement and respect?

We should offer equal respect and acknowledgement to a learned professor and a teenager with an ASBO? To Nick Griffin and Bonnie Greer?

This about approaching what Rogers called ‘unconditional positive regard‘ and what Gandhi was getting at when he said,

“All humanity is one undivided and indivisible family, and each one of us is responsible for the misdeeds of all the others.”

This is not about valuing and acknowledging people’s opinions, actions, beliefs and ideas equally – but about valuing the human being that stands behind them.

The latest draft of the occupational standards for community development workers go on to say:

Community Development practitioners work with communities and organisations to challenge the oppression and exclusion of individuals and groups. This will be undertaken in a way which:

  • Acknowledges where there is inequality and discrimination, and rejects and challenges any form of it
  • Supports and develops anti-oppressive policies and practices
  • Respects, values, supports and promotes the value of difference and diversity
  • Promotes and supports diverse communities to agree on their common concerns and interests
  • Acknowledges the diverse nature of society and seeks to understand and support others to understand the nature of social diversity and oppression with respect to marginalised communities and minorities.

This requires an incredible act of tightrope walking.

  • To reject and challenge inequality and discrimination without oppressing?
  • To promote the value of difference and diversity while helping diverse communities to agree on common concerns?

Enterprise Coaching – One Day Workshop

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Just been putting together a one day Introduction to Enterprise Coaching programme. Unfortunately because delegates are coming from far and wide we have a late start and early finish.
Here is the outline:
10.30 Arrive, register, welcome etc
11.00am Introductions and Objectives Exercise
11.30 – What are we Trying to Achieve with Enterprise and Entrepreneurship?
12.00 – Self Directed Learning – a framework for managing and leading our own development
12.30 – When I was a Kid – An Insight into (part of) our target market
13.00 – Lunch
13.45 – Situational Enterprise – understanding technical and psychological demands of the service
14.15 – The Enterprise Coaching Cycle and 4 Interventions styles
15.00 – An exercise in acceptant interventions
15.30 – Self image and enterprise
15.45 – So what might change?
16.00 – Close
How does it look?  Interesting?  Challenging?  Relevant?

Just been putting together a one day Introduction to Enterprise Coaching programme. Because delegates are coming from far and wide we have a late start and early finish.

Here is the outline:

10.30 – Arrive, register, welcome etc

11.00am – Introductions and Objectives Exercise

11.30 – What are We Trying to Achieve with Enterprise and Entrepreneurship?

12.00 – Self Directed Learning – a framework for managing and leading our own development

12.30 – When I was a Kid – An Insight into (part of) our target market

13.00 – Lunch

13.45 – Situational Enterprise – understanding technical and psychological demands of the service

14.15 – The Enterprise Coaching Cycle and 4 Interventions styles

15.00 – An Exercise in Acceptant Intervention

15.30 – Self Image and Enterprise

15.45 – So what might change?

16.00 – Close

How does it look?  Interesting?  Challenging?  Relevant?

What else would you want to see covered?

There is so much material and so little time!

Alternatives to Tireless Exertions and Passionate Concern…

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Human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable…

Every step toward the goal of justice requires sacrifice, suffering, and struggle; the tireless exertions and passionate concern of dedicated individuals.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

These days it seems that every step towards the goal of social justice requires a government policy and an associated funding stream.  We expect the state to sort this stuff out for us.  Well, it hasn’t and I suspect it can’t.

And given how the funding climate is likely to shape up over the next few years, even if the state did know how to sort this out it won’t have the money.  So instead I think we need a return to community development work that:

  • is rooted in communities rather than government departments
  • embraces affordable and human scale interventions rather than national projects and the rolling out of grand plans
  • honours the integrity of individuals over the narrow outcomes being purchased by funders
  • that attracts investment from venture philanthropists as well as the public purse.

Perhaps it is time to invest less in state funded mangerialism and more in ‘tireless exertions and passionate concern of dedicated individuals’.

Community Development in Leeds

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I have been inspired to start this blog to try and provide a home for the practice of community development work in Leeds.

It seems to me that much ‘community development’ work in the city is actually the delivery of national and local government initiatives prepared in response to policies that may have had very little input from the communities that they are designed to help.

Just because we call it community development work does not make it so!

Good community development workers are increasingly becoming an extension of the state rather than a catalyst for genuine community development.  I am fed up of hearing people tell me that they take public money and then see how far they can go in subverting it to do ‘proper’ community development work.  Not only are the ethics of this questionable – but so too is the efficacy.

If high quality community development processes work then we should ensure that they are properly resourced.  And if the public purse won’t pay for stuff that it can’t control then we must look elsewhere for investment.

But this is not about turning our backs on public funding.  It is about developing a proper relationship with funders so that they recognise what underpins effective community development work (long term relationships and an adherence to a set of values and practices) and themselves managing to resist the temptation to buy pale imitations and short-cuts.