Bearwood Community Hub project development manager Sally Taylor reflects on her conversations about how to include people who are usually excluded.
One of the reasons behind wanting to pursue this idea of Bearwood Community Hub in an accessible place on Bearwood Road is to create a hive of activity and welcome for people who aren’t yet connected (there are lots of them, our research tells us) to all the wonderful things we have access to in Bearwood. To do that it’s really important that we have conversations with people who tend to find themselves excluded, unconnected to - or disconnected from - their local community.
With the mantra of ‘no community is hard-to-reach, it’s just that we haven’t tried hard enough to reach them’ ringing in my ears, I invited a few people from my personal/professional network who support people in vulnerable personal, employment or housing situations to meet and help me think through the following:
How do we involve people who usually don’t have a voice in the process of designing and developing the community hub?
The notes from that meeting have all been collected here. It’s a visual tool - click on it and you’ll be able to move around the onscreen ‘canvas’ just like you do on google maps, zooming in and out or moving right to left. If you have any visual impairments, please contact me at hello@bearwood.cc and I’ll describe it to you or provide you with a text version.
I started with my own network to make it manageable and ensure a more in depth conversation than an open community meeting - but with the confidence that starting small isn’t the end point - being as open as possible is. I also started by acknowledging my own privilege as a white woman with a nice house, many supportive friends and no worries about being able to feed my family. I and others like me can’t be designing a community hub. We can only be an equal part of it, alongside many others who make up our diverse community.
So what did we learn together?
That there are many opportunities to take the design of community spaces and events out to where people are. Perhaps it’s at a curry night in one of the Hagley Road hostels. For other leaders who came to the meeting, it’s about going back to the people they support and asking directly, then feeding back to me.
We talked about the importance of not falling into a trap where we view people as a homogenous group who we imagine to be vulnerable - and if you are in a precarious position in any aspect of your life you’ll understand what we’re saying here - we need to stop making assumptions and just start talking. Everyone in our community is different, wants different things, has different needs and brings different strengths to a project like this. But how do we find out what those are? We ask. Directly. Whether it’s me or a local resident who wants to help or someone from an organisation already supporting local people.
So that’s what we started. That’s what we’re doing. You’ll see on the link to the virtual whiteboard that we’ve already started imagining what a hub could do, how it could feel, how it should run, what difference it could make. Will you help us develop the detail, just like the attendees at our 18 November meeting did? Email hello@bearwood.cc or call on 07832259658 if you would like to help, contribute your opinion, or invite us to your local group. We’re building a picture of what a community centre or hub on our high street could be. Are you in it?