Working in the community for an organisation How you can make it work better for everyone

Is your practice framework not being appreciated? Constantly hitting brick walls and being frustrated by miscommunication? Feeling like you are mismatched with your environment? Having trouble getting your role clear? Conflicted about working ‘top down or bottom up’? Every community development worker knows all too well the stress of working in a situation where it feels like the goals of the organisation are constantly in conflict with personal values and perceptions of what the community really needs. This workshop session will explore some of the issues that contribute to the tension and present some frameworks to aid understanding and provide an opportunity to share some ‘tips and tricks’ on how to more effectively negotiate more space to get on and do the work that is so important to us. Whether your ‘bete noir’ is economic rationalism, managerialism, corporatism or the latest fundamentalist management fad, you can’t afford to sit around, waiting for others to come to your way of thinking. We need to learn how to understand, engage with and work in and through the system...or else become a consultant! The greatest challenge in presenting a paper on this topic is accounting for the great diversity on two fronts, from Agency to Agency and from Worker to Worker. To begin, defining Community Development in a local Government context is very difficult. A recent report states, Community Development is central to Local Government, with its emphasis on serving people, enhancing communities and being responsive to local needs. People issues are mainstream Local Government activities, and for decades, Councils have been involved in shaping and building communities. Councils are also committed to increasing the community’s capacity to generate and sustain cooperative responses to issues. The focus of community development is on HOW we conduct our practice in local communities, and about determining and achieving desired and cooperatively planned outcomes. (Working Together to Develop our Communities LGCSAA, Townsville, 1999, p.10, emphasis added) Well...is it, really? The experience of many who have tried to do Community Development in a Local Government context is very much to the contrary. Or is it more accurate to suggest that the above statement reflects the author’s belief that Community Development ‘SHOULD BE’ central to the role of local government. The 3Rs (Roads, rates and rubbish) are central to the role of local government, and there is nothing to stop particular LGAs from heading down the CD path, including the Local Government Act. So why is it often so difficult? There are several issues to consider. Of all the functions of local government, CD is perhaps the least constrained by statutory requirements. This is a mixed blessing. On one hand the relative lack of legal requirement is fertile ground for experimentation. On the other, this means that local government is under less obligation to ‘have to’ do CD. This explains in part the wide variety of responses from Local Government to the CD challenge. Given that CD is a relatively new activity of local government (particularly in WA), it is also often the least understood, particularly by Senior Officers. Given CD’s relatively recent arrival in local government circles and corresponding addition to staff teams, it is much more common for Senior Officers to have risen to the top through the ranks of Corporate and Financial Management, Engineering or Town Planning than for CD specialists to make it to the ‘top’. While such appointees would generally bring a level of professional qualification to the position, it is most likely their training would be specific to their core discipline. A common feature of most professional qualifications is a high level of specialisation. John Ralston Saul identifies the danger of over-specialisation as a tendency to what he calls ‘instrumental rationalism’, which he contrasts to the capacity to consider issues in light of the ‘bigger picture’ of society and the common good. This instrumentalism can take many forms. The easiest for CD practitioners to see is economic rationalism and managerial rationalism. Much has been written on these topics and I will not elaborate here. Community Development is perhaps the exception to the trend towards over-specialisation. As a discipline, CD requires a more generalist orientation, consistent with the core beliefs of inclusiveness, openness and social optimism. Tertiary courses in Community Development generally include studies in political philosophy and social theory. While CD has been advocated by practitioners across the political spectrum, most practitioners are working for the development of a more vital community, where members are more connected and active in social and community affairs, fundamentally based on the belief that such an outcome is possible. This perspective stands in stark contrast to the dominant world-view. Social optimism stands as a denial of those enormous non-human inevitable truths which are so often presented to us today as the selfevident nature of common sense. Most of them turn around general assumptions of utilitarianism, self-interest and uncontrollable forces. This false common sense so often imposed upon our debates is essentially pessimistic about human nature and human intelligence. It is the wink-wink-nudge-nudge cynic’s version of how the world works. (On Equilibrium, John Ralston Saul, Penguin Books, Toronto, 2002, p.22-3) This clash of fundamental world-views often leaves the CD practitioner in Local Government at odds with the bureaucracy they seek to work through. Turning to look for allies the CD practitioner might search for a champion through the ranks. Sometimes this can lead to even greater confusion. As Ralston Saul continues... As this fracturing is destructive for society, you might imagine that the various elites would make a point of removing their blinkers. Not discouraging the fractured search, but counter-balancing it with a sense of lateral connections. Political, financial and specialist power seems purposely to do the opposite, and so stands in the way of the sensible use of understood knowledge. Why? Because a ‘sensible use’ undermines the powers of fractured specialization. Or, quite simply, a sensible use of understood knowledge might not offer the best short-term financial return. And politics is now so dependent on the specialists and the large businesses that few politicians would push seriously for an integrated approach. (Ralston Saul, op cit, p. 301) The end point of the search can be a very lonely place. Not only is there little understanding and support within the ranks and from the potential champions, there is not even room for a shared understanding of what the CD practitioner is on about! This is further compounded by a lack of clarity over key definitional issues. Examples include: • Community Development is often taken as another term for community service delivery. Again, the community is perceived as passive, in need of more ‘experts’ to come and do something to make them better. • Or the participatory aspect of the development process is obscured by an overemphasis on the importance of elected members. Again a pessimistic view of the community is to the fore, i.e. incapable of, or disinterested in participating in deliberation over decisions regarding community issues. • Perceptions of the relationship between Council and the community vary. This can range from seeing Council as fully representative of the community to seeing the organization as completely separate from the community. Either extreme results in isolation and unhelpful dichotomies. Given the admittedly bleak picture painted above, how then is it possible for the CD practitioner to succeed, or at least survive in this often-hostile environment? The purpose of this introduction is to name some of the more extreme experiences of working from a CD perspective in a local government perspective. By doing this I hope to normalize them a bit or at least assure you that you are not alone if your experience does not match the ideal of CD being ‘CENTRAL’ to local government. Many times there will be much more correlation and understanding of what CD practitioners are on about and what the organization considers to be ‘core business’. This is because local government is part of the community, regardless of how some people define it. As such local governments will inevitably become involved in a range of community issues. To be effective as CD workers it is imperative to develop our understanding of the process of engagement in the particular setting in which we work. This will vary from place and probably from issue to issue. Like all models, the following has the potential to distort as well as illuminate, but this model provides some clues of how to more effectively engage with the system we work within.