LPIP Hub Place Fellow Helen O’Gara continues her series on the felt experiences of the community development workforce, ‘We Are Guests’. This second blog explores the emotional experiences involved in working with communities. Other blog in the series:
As I talked with four people, from different parts of the country and different parts of the community development system, there was a glaring theme.
The emotional work
Each interviewee illustrated the ability to hold the tension of trauma and distress, with hope and tenacity. This appears to be something of a gift within the community development space.
The interviewees all recalled stories of residents, other professionals, and sometimes their own personal experiences. Each time, stating it was just one story in a great mass of stories that they could share. The human experience of trauma is a central part of what they work with, what they experience and what they fight to relieve.
None of them shies away from the emotional labour involved in their work. They shared it, they were emotionally attuned to it, and it propelled them.
“I want more done. And that’s what makes me intrinsically motivated to want to get on and do stuff, and I’m impatient for the right reasons.”
There were elements that were resonant with the concept of ‘moral ambition’, but where much of that discourse leads to changing the world in big ways with big programmes or big ideas, our interviewees were relentless in the pursuit of fairness, recovery and democracy on a local scale. This is an asset and a specific skillset that encompasses resilience, one that can be honoured or can be taken advantage of.
“I wear these experiences, and it’s important for me to stay emotionally connected to what I do. It’s a compass for me, and it’s very important that I feel that, you know, but I’m not disabled by it. I feel it, and I’m empowered to want to take action.”
Wearing experience
There are concepts of vicarious and secondary trauma that will be in play for these practitioners, and likely those they have worked with – it’s certainly apparent through the way they have noticed what leads to burnout and high turnover of people in their workforce. The cumulative impact of hearing distressing stories, of meeting with, and being alongside, people experiencing trauma.
They bring this to the table when they work with policymakers, decision-makers, when they apply for funding, and when they advocate; they are bringing all of this to the table. They bring the felt experiences of their communities with them.
They bring the opportunity for empathy.
“People come in at the lowest moments in their lives… and they’ve no idea where to go.”
“You take it home without knowing it. You think about it at night.”
“It’s not just a job. You’re dealing with human life.”
Grace and Conflict
Another part of the emotional cost that struck me during these conversations was their ability to withstand conflict. The expected ones were negotiating on their community’s behalf, hosting community meetings, whether that’s about a skate park, housing or traveller sites and seeing conflict arise, managing this with creativity, democracy and care. The cost I didn’t expect, which they shared with grace, was the examples of abuse they received, often from the institutions they sought to support in making decisions.
“I got death threats from people.”
“It was frightening at times, but I carried on.”
“then what I got was all this really inflammatory reaction and nobody answering the phone and hostility and personal attacks and jibes and discrediting, which is very painful. It’s a very painful thing to go through”
These stories didn’t always end with it being ‘ok in the end’; there were lost arguments, there was loss of funding, and there was continued animosity. But they remained. They are still there. Where possibly, that other person, or situation has blown through, tables have turned over time, and it does not feel so ripe for argument.
The grace that comes with time is fascinating to me. These practitioners have seen changes grow and shrink. They have witnessed waves of policy, waves of wealth and poverty, and waves of people, and with that comes a stability and a resilience to withstand future storms. We hope.
They are guests in a much wider ecosystem
In most of the conversations, we discussed endings. Succession plans, an end to their own careers. It was clear that they knew they were just a small part of the area’s journey. Despite their longstanding knowledge and fight, being there longer than most, they knew they were not forever.
“I would never allow my personal aspirations to stand in the way of the purpose I represent. It’s the mission that matters, not the four walls of my entity”
“We’ve been laying the foundations for that for a long, long time.”
“But it seems to be every time we lose somebody, we gain somebody else and we slightly change again. You can see it building on the stones that were already there”
Maybe there is something in this temporal attitude that allows the resilience to trauma to grow?
Drs Cara Courage and Anita McKeown have developed the term ‘trauma-informed place-making‘, emerging from experiences through Covid-19 and Black Lives Matter and exploring traumatic events, the impact on place and recovery across the world.
What I heard from these community development practitioners I spoke with is their lived experience of just this concept. They are the trauma-informed place-makers; they are those who have experienced trauma in place, whether that be personal or collective, and this has shaped the way they work and respond.
From my very small sample, there were diverse personal demographic characteristics that bring an intersectional lens to their experience, of both their own journey and their community, whether geographical, racial, gendered, age-related or by sexual orientation. This was discussed, not as a defining factor, nor as their mission to bring justice to a particular community, but it was a lens, where they knew their own identity played a part in how they were viewed and how they viewed themselves, whether that be privilege, injustice or a nuanced intersectional view.
If they had received any training on trauma, it was person-centred, but where their professional skill base met this knowledge, and often with some inherent skill, came an underlying philosophy and way of working, not completely articulated, but that resonated with ‘trauma-informed place-making’.
Timelines
The emotional labour that takes place among the community development workforce is huge, and the cost is great. Yet the optimism, passion and tenacity remain. Part of trauma-informed work is moving from an attitude of ‘what is wrong with you?’ to ‘what happened to you?’. It is a broadening of perspective and encourages an empathy that can lead to solutions in a way that fixing a pure problem in front of you may not.
Are we sometimes surprised by difficult emotions presented to us in a policy making process? If we listen to the timelines in our communities and ask our community development workforce to share what has happened here, we may understand more of the journey they have been on and what they have held, and that emotional labour can begin to be shared.
This blog was written by Helen O’Gara, LPIP Hub Place Fellow. Helen is a Public Health Principal.
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Disclaimer:
The views expressed in this analysis post are those of the author and not necessarily those of City-REDI or the University of Birmingham.