Last week I got a bit derailed by a headline and so didn’t write about what I had intended. I had expected to be similarly derailed by something this week. I had anticipated that there would be some announcement from the Labour party conference that would divert me… but there hasn’t… though this week’s ramblings are connected in a way to the idea of a national care service.
This was what I was going to write about last week… the connections made in community spaces of all kinds and the importance of third spaces (from pubs to village halls and to public parks) in creating healthy communities and how to me this is one of the things that makes neighbourhood health an exciting proposition if only we can keep ourselves from being swamped by conversations driven by accountability, governance and key performance indicators. And I have been having a lot of those kinds of conversations over the past few months!
So this is the stuff that has been occupying my mind for a few weeks now… it is something I keep circling back to… like Pooh and Piglet walking in the woods tracking a Woozle.
I think there is a level of confusion around terminology that is confusing the conversation… not least the idea that neighbourhood and community are somehow synonyms. We all know they are different things. To most people a neighbourhood is a place, a distinct geography within which people live their lives. A community is a group of people with a shared connection, purpose or interest. There are many communities within a neighbourhood and a person can be part of multiple communities. However, I think the problem may have arisen on the desks of some policy people and in the meeting rooms of officialdom when they talked of ‘the’ community, a homogenous mass of people ‘out there’ in the wild, potentially dangerous in that their intentions are unknown and unmanageable.
I wonder though if we can simply agree that NHS England and central government policy people have hijacked the word ‘neighbourhood’ and made it something unfamiliar to us (whoever conjured up an image of a neighbourhood of 30,000 people never mind a 150,000 person neighbourhood?!) and move on to what matters – the communities and the people living their lives in those neighbourhoods and perhaps develop our understanding that people come and go – they move in and out of neighbourhoods (of any size).
People’s connection with a community is, I think, much stronger. Which brings me back to the ‘third spaces’ and the connections people make. This past week, as well as going to see friends play in bands and seeing the connection and community that builds around the shared experience of music I have caught up with some old friends – one who lives in France but who I have known since they were little, and some who I went to University with around 30 years ago. We were all mature (allegedly) students, and it was wonderful, if a little odd, to be going to an 80th birthday party with somebody you went to lectures with.
What struck me was that whilst we hadn’t seen each other for many years we were instantly able to strike up conversations, not just reminiscences, but conversations about the here and now. Yes, of course there were tales of misdemeanours and struggles to remember the names of people but there was an immediate sense of connection and it made me wonder about the enduring nature of community when it is based on shared experiences and interests.
And so, in the circling back and round of this stuff in my head I wonder if in our hunt for community we are missing the point and it is right there in front of us, it is you and me. And in some powerful and interesting conversations I have been involved in over the past few weeks around what makes a vibrant, strong or resilient community I wonder if we have somehow forgotten that it is people who make a community vibrant, strong and resilient and their ability to live lives that have meaning for them. And I think it is just that, the ability to live a life that has meaning, that sits behind the Labour party announcement of a state pension that rises every year, no personal care charges and a National Care Service.
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