#community development worker

Public Health Engineering Department Jobs For Sub Engineer, Junior Clerk and Others January 2020 (45 Posts)

Positions:

Sub Engineer, Junior Clerk, Assistant Computer Operator, Tracer, Research Assistant, Pesh Imam, Community Development Worker, Lab Assistant, Data Entry Operator,

As usual, I awoke recently to the daily morning show on Radio Wales and an interview with a fire officer whose recent shifts had comprised exclusively of fighting deliberately-set hill fires at various locations around the south Wales valleys during the first extended warm spell of the spring.

It was not so much his straight-from-the-textbook condemnation aimed at the unknown perpetrators, or his very obvious frustration that struck me. Rather it was the weary, resigned expectation of a man, and service, that faces the same challenges year in, year out.

The interviewer enquired as to what preventative and engagement work takes place with young people (though the perpetrators are hardly ever caught, they are nonetheless assumed to be young....) and he spoke of "going into schools" and having done so for several years, following an established curriculum of outlining the risks, consequences and costs, both financial and potentially human.

The article caused me to recall visiting a community in the north of Abergavenny/Y Fenni in 2010 and on arrival noticing a large smiley face mowed into the hillside  that looms over that community, the Deri (see Ted Pearsell's Flickr account for the image). A Community Development Worker (CDW) mentioned that the face had become the talk of the community of late, its creator(s) unknown and that whereas the hillside had in previous years been the location for malicious grass fires, during that summer none had been started because, the CDW felt, the smiley face had been adopted by the community. The community development sector will frequently refer to the importance of ownership by communities, and often it is ownership in an emotional sense rather in any material, legal or financial sense. At a, presumably, modest cost the smiley face had become the means by which the surrounding landscape had become of more value to the community. And even if this was not shared by everyone in that community, the sense of ownership and enhanced value might well have been sufficiently palpable to the perpetrators of previous hill fires that they were disinclined to repeat the arson.

In its adoption of Results Based Accountability* (RBA) (Friedman, 2005) Wales's Communities First programme requires of local plans to consider seven Performance Accountability questions.

(Friedman, 2005, page 83)

Abergavenny/Y Fenni's smiley face strikes me as the perfect example of a low-cost idea that brings about an improvement in a social ill. It is not, however, enough to replicate it in every community where hill fires are problem. RBA requires of us to question 'What works?' and to examine apparent solutions for the underlying reasons why.

(Friedman, 2005, page 82)

Back in Abergavenny/Y Fenni' it would be interesting to know whether the statistical cliff off which hill fire incidences fell that summer was acknowledged by the local fire service. Even if they did it is to the CDW's credit that he had sought to tune-in to the community's wavelength on the matter, and without necessarily being conscious of it was informally recording information as part of a research agenda.

This is not to say that the educational approach is without merit but doing it because it is what we've done previously is an insufficiently evidence-based justification. And seems odd given the example of an alternative solution on the Fire Service's doorstep.

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Clarke, S, Mendola Byatt, A, Hoban, M, Powell, D (eds.) (2002) Community Development in South Wales, University of Wales Press: Cardiff.

Can't believe this is now over a decade old. A must for any community development worker working in Wales (even north Wales!).

Surely it is time for a revised version or a collection of new perspectives?

Communities First entering a second decade; the publication of a national framework for community development; a much expanded and trained community development workforce; government recognition of the need for and funding of ongoing development of the workforce; recession and forced austerity; continuing divergence of UK and Wales regeneration policy; advent of primary legislative powers for the National Assembly for Wales; the Children and Families Measure in Wales.

It was the ever-excellent Participation Cymru that brought to my attention recently an imaginative, yet simple and low cost proposal to:

"establish a new vehicle ‘Street Ambassadors Wales’ with the aim of establishing and supporting a street ambassador in every street in Wales."

Wales Council for Voluntary Action, Timebanking Wales and Blaengarw-based Creation Development Trust are the proponents of the proposal and a paper, Creating another piece of the jigsaw - Street Ambassadors / Creu darn arall o'r jig-so - Llysgenhadon y Stryd,  outlining the proposal in more detail can be found here or yma. What appeals to me is that the proposal sets out broad principles that can be adapted to suit neighbourhoods.

For instance, it suggests the idea being adopted in 'areas' where an area might be defined as any from a "local authority, sub-local authority, Communities First cluster, Community Council [or] ward". And that a 'development agency', who identifies and recruits the street ambassadors, might take the form of a "County Voluntary Council, development trust, housing association, church, community council, rotary [or] volunteer centre". 

The paper sees street ambassadors as key in being able "to mobilise people at the very grass roots, street level" and in so doing facilitating through co-production the transformative change required of public service. Such radical and large scale change requires a robustly constructed framework of political, policy, organisational and financial imperatives. Yet clearly without the consent, effort and energy of residents the street ambasadors idea will wither on the vine. As Hoban (2002, 218) accurately observes:

"It is the ownership of the action that increases involvement"

The paper's receptiveness to a number of different spatial scales and range of potential development agencies is to be welcomed. The non-prescriptiveness of the what constitutes the 'canvas' across which ambassadors operate allows for residents and neighbours, perhaps via a process that is animated by a Community Development Worker, to take ownership of the ambassador role, the information it shares and how it networks. The paper even suggests that

"street ambassadors can develop their role...by networking with other street ambassadors to form other neighbourhoods"

The key to the extent to which, as the paper aspires, neighbourhoods become the "building blocks of organising" - of local services, different programmes and initiatives - will depend on what happens at the 'seams' where areas meet. But as the above quote suggests it could well be the ambassadors and the development agencies who will have the ownership and autonomy to decide.

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References

I recall starting a community development job in Merthyr Tydfil on a small, predominantly social housing estate in early 2003. Within a couple of days of starting I noticed a house scarred by an apparently recent house fire. It turned out that a parent with three young children lived in the house in which a chip fan fire had extensively damaged the kitchen and downstairs. It had happened no more than three weeks earlier and fortunately there were no injuries incurred other than minor smoke inhalation on the family's part.

Within a couple of days the estate had had a whip round and raised over £250 for the family to help with the costs of repairing the damage. It didn't seem a huge amount of money but for households with limited incomes the sentiment was obvious and the donation was heartfelt.

In order to take up this role I had relocated from north Wales to Cardiff and was renting a flat in what was very tenuously Cardiff Bay. We lived in Windsor Quay which was one of the first housing developments in the south Cardiff regeneration scheme on reclaimed land on Ferry Road.

As time went by and my wife and I saw so few of our neighbours, let alone interacted with them, an irony struck me. That in Merthyr a neighbourhood had demonstrated very clearly a greater cohesion, solidarity and sense of community and belonging than the one from which I commuted every morning. Yet was a community that was in need of 'developing' and intervention.

I previously blogged on how the concept of Civil Domestic Product helps redefine affluence in a way that considers, among other things, social connectedness (see Timebanking Wales for further information). The Merthyr estate may not have been home to as many graduates as Windsor Quay was, and there are presumably stark health inequalities between the two neighbourhoods but the two would swap positions in a notional league table if social connectedness was assessed.

There is a danger that Community Development becomes a pejorative term in that it becomes associated with areas that are labelled in other pejorative ways: deprived, disadvantaged, run-down, unambitious. On a  number of measures Windsor Quay is not deprived or disadvantaged but its reservedness and insularity made it a very disconnected and incohesive community; even isolated and isolating.