MrsBrown's philosophy of life and stuff

 Oops.  I made a facebook post a couple of days ago in which I pondered the nature of volunteering in my local neighborhood and suggested that hanging around in local spaces was important community work.  Unfortunately, I used a recent event that I worked on as the introduction, and one of my co-organisers has taken exception to my "attitude" to her volunteers and the suggestion that "hanging around" was more important than cooking sausages.  It's terrible that I have upset her, and I obviously failed to see that as a possible outcome (thanks autistic brain) but otoh, she's sort of confirmed my disquiet by revealing that at least 2 of her volunteers weren't local, in fact they drove 2 hours each way to help by cooking sausages "for the kids". If they'd "hung around", maybe I would have known that :).

To be clearer than I was in my facebook post;  I don't think that volunteering is a bad thing, and I think it's great that people are willing to volunteer.  I do think we need to be aware of the impact and goals of the volunteering we do and the programs that are run. My facebook post and this post are intended to explore that issue and my thinking.  I am pretty certain of my values, but I am not so certain of the best goals and implementation methods so I appreciate input from others and actively seek it - generally online because there are more of my people there.

This area, and other inner city areas, have a long history of privileged people coming in to do good works.  It's how it was possible to demolish what it sounds like was very functional housing, because people who weren't living here decided that it was substandard and had the ability to agitate and lobby to get the government to demolish and build the public housing towers.  It continues today with church organisations who run "homework clubs", using private school kids as tutors and then funneling successful students into Catholic high schools, leaving the kids who aren't as successful, or who don't have parents who make them go to homework clubs to go to the local high school. It appears to be great, but may not be the best outcome for the community.

One of the nicest things about the volunteering I've done recently was the increase in the number of people who i now say "hi" to as a wander in the local area.  For me, that's what social cohesion is about - increasing the number of familiar faces for everyone, so that we all feel more comfortable in our local community.  From my reading on the Transition Towns movement, we all need to increase the number of people in our local area that we can turn to when we need help.  That means that I want to get to know both my immediate neighbors, who live in houses, and my other neighbors, who live in the flats and so far, I have. 

I feel like getting locals to hang with locals has been my major goal with my community work, together with the caution of avoiding unintended community consequences.  I feel like my summer has not achieved this as strongly as i would have liked although, as I've gotten older, I have learned that you need to identify the unexpected wins.  So I don't think it's been a complete waste.

Firstly, just hanging out in some of the spaces in the local area means that I now understand how woefully they've been maintained and provisioned compared with  how they would be if they were park spaces provided by local council.  Pleasingly, we've won a lot of brownie points with the local MP, who is also housing minister, so we've started having this conversation.  This needs more work.

Secondly, we've had to navigate the same bullshit bureaucracy that everyone else has to navigate.  Except that we have the white, english speaking privilege that means we now have the ammunition to work towards a positive change.  Now to actually do it.

i think the 3rd win might be that I now have a much more nuanced understanding of what i'm doing with my community work and what I want from it.  Thanks for the ride.

So, even if we didn't get the locals coming and hanging out in the local spaces, there were some useful gains from my summer of work.  Now to work out what I want to do next.

A few weeks ago I posted about intentional communities and suggested that perhaps I should just get to know my neighbors.

Tonight I went to my first Urban Coup meeting and found somone who had the same thought - and did it!!!!!

The Sharehood is a website set up to facilitate neighborhoods becoming communities that share babysitting, swap work and get to know each other socially.

After you join you can only see profiles and offers/wanteds from people who live within 400m of your address.

They provide a sample letter for letterboxing your neighborhood and then suggest you set up some sort of social get together.  They also facilitate a more formal bartering system.

It's really cool!! I've joined but now I need to letterbox so my neighbors can also join.