The more I work with communities and community organisations, the more I learn about the value of the interpersonal side of development work. To be effective, professionals from sectors that regularly interact with local communities need to listen better, empathise more and take the time to understand the complexities of community life. These skills and aptitudes are undervalued, but they make a huge difference to the quality of collaboration between communities and external professionals seeking to work with them.
Nowhere is this more apparent than when a project is first being discussed. A project could be an improvement to a service like child care or aged care, an initiative to tackle a social problem like youth disengagement, or research designed to shed light on a local issue. Either way, the manner in which the initial discussions take place provides an insight into the ways in which power plays out in the relationship between the community and visiting professionals.
The reality is that often professionals come to the community with a pre-conceived idea for a project. It might be one that arises through changes in government policy (like more money for support to parents) or something that is central to the objectives or an NGO, such as toy libraries or youth groups. Professionals are supposed to be creative. Coming up with ideas and suggestions is what we ought to do.
Having contacted the community and been invited to share our proposal, we might propose our idea to the community and in the same breath say that we want it to be community-led. This is where it gets interesting, because the question is; who is doing the development? One of the most direct responses I heard was when a community member said:
No, it can’t be done that way. You can’t come to us with an idea and then talk to a bunch of people individually, expecting that to be enough. We need to tell you who to talk with and how we want to make decisions on this subject. The right people need to be involved and we need time to talk it through.
He may have been thinking, as I was, that development was about to be done to the community. But when local people are able to say what they want, the power shifts. And the results are usually better as a result. What is needed is for outsiders to ask these questions of ourselves and the community: