Council or the nutritionists. Further, as you can imagine, that conversation most certainly did not take place inside the big yellow bus! The conversation occurred when I contacted the Roshni Asian Women’s Centre, located in the heart of Barton Street. The Centre, which opened in 1995, was a place for women to meet and interact in a safe environment. Before that, the women met in their own homes.
I knew nobody at the Centre, but I didn’t think twice about contacting them, as it seemed the most natural place to start. We needed a way to connect with this specific community about food and nutrition issues. I often laugh that decades later in my community engagement training and workshops, I emphasise the importance of contacting relevant community organisations. It makes such good sense. Participants always nod and take notes, embracing the concept like it’s rocket science.
The staff member at the Centre welcomed me warmly and we chatted about the Centre, the women who regularly attended, and the community as a whole. We were comfortable with each other so we discussed the various possibilities before we agreed that she would discuss with the women the potential for food-related programs to be part of the Centre’s programs.
Before long, we were running a series of cookery classes, led by a well-known local Asian cookbook author. However, these classes were not simply about teaching women how to cook. They were a forum where participants could share recipe ideas and discuss where they shop, how they budget and so on. We easily introduced a shared, peer-to-peer learning experience in a safe and familiar location. Our targeted approach was a far cry from the top-down ‘I’m the expert, listen to me tell you what to do’ methodology. Here, again, as can be seen in the news coverage in the image overleaf, I learned about the importance of involving people in decision making and problem solving about issues that affect them at a household level.
Of course, there is a role for traditional engagement approaches. And I had my share of them in that job. Sometimes I felt out of my depth, such as when I was delivering nutrition training to a team of NHS Direct call centre nurses. I was so nervous, young, and unqualified. One man was kind enough to give me feedback that I said ‘OK’ too many times. What the?! Maybe it was my discomfort showing. Or maybe he was just being a moron.
My bosses in the health promotion centre knew I was totally new to health promotion, let alone food and nutrition. They offered to support me through a Graduate Diploma in Health Education Promotion at the University of Gloucestershire. What a wonderful opportunity for a young woman who had been thrown in at the deep end. A day per week from my work life to hang out at the local university and be paid… super indulgent! I made the most of it.
Three significant pieces of learning during that Graduate Diploma year matured my perspectives about community engagement (at the time and ever since). While we had a huge reading list and a diverse range of essays and projects, all three lessons came from the same textbook (that still sits on my desk today: Health Promotion - Foundations for Practice⁹).
Lesson One was about models and approaches to health promotion. Beattie’s structural analysis of the repertoire of health promotion approaches was the first time I had encountered the various approaches (authoritarian, ‘top-down’ and expert-led), as opposed to negotiation, ‘bottom-up’ and valuing individual autonomy. Beattie’s model (page 106) explained differences in persuasion interventions aimed at individuals but led by experts, compared to legislative interventions led by experts but intended to protect whole communities. I also learned about personal counselling type interventions (client-led and focused on personal development), with the expert being more of a facilitator. Finally, I learned about the community development approach, which seeks to empower or enhance the skills of a group or local community, helping them to recognise what they have in common and to take action together.
I particularly loved that Beattie’s analysis included references to the political ideologies of each of these approaches, from conservatism to reformist, to libertarian, humanist to radical ideology. In my mind, I summarised parts of this model quite simply as the left versus right on a political spectrum, with left equalling collective action and the right being a more individualistic in approach.
I was so open to these concepts at this point in my educational and professional journey. I greatly valued opportunities to explore theoretical concepts of interventions within a health promotion paradigm. I began to connect the dots about my love for community. I remembered that in my early years, New Labour told me that things could only get better. It was all starting to come together and make sense.
Of course, my studies were about approaches of health promotion. However, those approaches equally apply to community engagement.
While I was reading about different political approaches to health promotion, I was aware of my own political leanings. I’ve always found myself very much in the centre of the political spectrum. Perhaps this is because I spent years being an independent facilitator or advocate. Or perhaps I’ve always been conscious that my client, the government, could change in an instant at any election and my business always needed to be ready to adapt to suit the policies of the current term. Or perhaps it is that my Dad’s parents were traditional working-class conservative ‘Tory’ supporters, and my Mum’s parents were socialist Labour party supporters. Or maybe I just want to be liked by everybody.
Then again, maybe it’s that I’ve always had fairly centralist view of the world. Whatever the reason, I believe it’s important to consider that community engagement is not about political persuasion. Left or right doesn’t matter as much as whether we are authentic and principled in the work we do.
These days, governments cannot decide whether or not they engage communities. Twenty-first century communities ask to be involved. At times, they demand it. They want governments to be representative of them and their needs and to listen to what they are saying. In recent years working with both left-wing and right-wing governments (and the left, right and central factions within them), I notice that engagement methodologies remain pretty much the same.
In the same Naidoo and Wills book, I discovered Dahlgren and Whitehead’s Determinants of Health model (1991). That was my second huge revelation. The model explained, layer by layer, the influences on an individual’s health. Starting at a very individual level, the authors explained that the first layers of influence are our age, gender, and other hereditary factors. These are closely followed by lifestyle factors, such as levels of support and influence within communities which can sustain or damage health. The next layer is about a person’s living and working conditions, as well as their access to facilities and services. And the final layer notes the importance of general socio-economic, cultural, and environmental conditions.
This model referred specifically to layers of influence on a person’s health. However, for the young Becky, it opened me to a depth of understanding of the concept of ‘community’ that I’d never considered. It communicated that a person doesn’t simply live in a community. There are so many layers to that person’s interactions with that community, whether the layers are of local or global significance.
These days, I use this model to help me consider which layer a particular community project or initiative is addressing. For example, a group of volunteers who meet to plant trees in their neighbourhood once a month may be addressing both the layer regarding their living and working conditions (providing more greenery, better shade). Equally, they may be addressing broader environmental conditions (such as tackling climate change). They are also, of course, individually working on their own lifestyle factors (being active, meeting new people) and building social and community networks.
These layers fascinated me so much that in 2013, I developed my own version of this model. I’d been working intensively across South Australia with several different government clients on a range of different topics. And one of the joys of being a community engagement specialist is that you get to hear a lot of interesting stuff!