And, of course, things that couldn’t be grown on the farm needed to be brought in from elsewhere, so I’d need to build a freight rail line or an airport, plus warehouses. I’d need train drivers and pilots and warehouse staff. And then, I’d need banks, post offices, pharmacies, and more. And the people in the houses would spend their weekends hiking through the nearby country park or swimming at the local swim centre. Their children would need schools, and playgrounds, dance studios, and sports fields. I’d need teachers, coaches, and people to maintain all the places. Before I knew it, I’d built a little community of place, with all the different people operating within it, all playing integral roles.
I absolutely loved playing this game, perhaps to the point that I should have been encouraged into a career of urban planning. But actually, on reflection, it was the interaction of the people within the community and different communities of interest within it that fascinated me. And even more, I was fascinated by how that community had formed with an initial purpose, and how that purpose was not necessarily of direct interest to the people within that community. That was because other industries had now grown to be their employers. Today, with my clients, I will often describe ‘community’ as people who live, work and play in an area, based on this exact concept.
There is no community on Earth that I’ve worked in that illustrates a game of Sim City in real life more than when I’ve worked in the outback town of Roxby Downs in South Australia. I undertook work with the Council and the Community Board during 2013 and I remember looking out of the tiny plane window as we began our descent to the endless flat red desert land. And then to see the tiny town appearing in the distance – just a dot on the horizon. And to recognise its entire reason for being: the Olympic Dam (a copper, uranium, gold and silver mine), next to the town.
This concept of community made me think of a petri dish in a science lab – a contained, defined area where all kinds of cells, cultures, patterns, and growth can be witnessed. In Roxby Down’s case, there were unique aspects to life in this town. For example, having a really high birth rate because of the demographic of workers moving to the town to work in the mine. And then being a wealthy community because of readily available, highly paid work. The town had little poverty and most of the town’s residents were shift workers. I’ve loved working there a couple of times now and always enjoy a morning run around the entire circumference of the town – town to the left me, desert on the right.
Even when a community isn’t located in the outback, with such a defined border defining exactly where that community ends, every community has these sorts of layers and boundaries, and a reason for being. Whether the community is a high-rise residential tower, a suburban street, a tribe in the deepest, darkest jungle, or a city of 10 million people, in my mind, each of these communities is a petri dish. And that fascinates me.
To illustrate my deep-rooted interest in this concept, one of my favourite films is The Truman Show, where Jim Carrey’s entire life is (totally unknown to him) being telecast live around the Earth 24 hours a day, within a totally purpose-built, almost petri-dish-like community. And a song I often sing to my daughters to ease them into sleep is Little Boxes, by Malvina Reynolds. My favourite lines are about the people in the houses who all go to the university and all come out the same! Reynolds wrote this song as a political statement about the uniformity and sameness, of houses along suburban streets with identical floor plans. Perhaps via this bedtime singing I’m subconsciously training my daughters to be community planners!
Back to 1999 and my final year at University. I expanded my interest in dance and the arts in community settings across West Yorkshire. My final assessment reflected my newfound passion: a group of seven high-school non-dancing boys choreographed and performed my final assessment! The image below shows them rehearsing for the piece called The Road We Travel, a dance based on patterns and space using their individual journeys to school as a movement stimulus to create patterns of varying dynamic, levels and direction. Apparently, this was yet another indication of my yearning for a career in community planning!
A couple of years later, I graduated with honours and a new passion: discovering opportunities for making things better. At the tender age of 21, I retired from dance to embrace my love of community.
The beginning of my career coincided with an era immediately following decades of Thatcherism, with a focus on austerity and cuts more than what people needed. Prime Minister Tony Blair’s more socially inclusive and progressive ideology was spreading across the nation, reflected in significant investment into public services and a flurry of job openings focusing on community. I applied for and won a National Lottery-funded post in a local, highly deprived and disadvantaged community. My professional life in community engagement then began.
Only now, looking back on my opportunities during those early Blair years of New Labour can I begin to see the impacts of this significant political shift as a catalyst for my journey of passion for conversation, connection, collaboration, and community. My reflection has extended to my childhood years and their effects on my emerging community consciousness. I know that childhood has dramatic and longstanding influences on the values we hold as adults. That gets me thinking about COVID-19 and its effects on the career decisions of children and young people currently living through the pandemic. When I consider the displays of leadership (or lack of leadership) internationally during the pandemic, I wonder about the sorts of leaders these young people might become. Only now, decades after receiving that VHS tape, I realise the significance of the political and societal context in which we operate as community engagement practitioners.
In recent times, I’ve heard community engagement leader Kylie Cochrane describe a Social Triangle™ theory³ – a triangle of society, where the three corners represent politics, religion, and community. She discusses the politics and religion corners, reflecting on the recent demise of trust in these two elements of society. Later she emphasises the strong role that community plays in modern society. Kylie argues that, as engagement in religion or politics diminishes as societal connectors, there will be greater emphasis on being a part of our local community – our children’s schools, local sporting clubs, service clubs, environmental groups, and more.
I agree with Kylie. In a few decades, I believe that we will recognise the deep significance of low levels of trust in government, business, media, and even not-for-profit organisations. And we will come to understand the impacts on community engagement. We will also acknowledge the effects of the widespread ability of people everywhere to share their opinions through a massive range of online tools. It is a truism that our political leaders, both locally and globally, continue to miss the mark. But there is a huge opportunity nested in this massive failure of leadership. Now, more than ever, we must focus on community-led involvement and activism. We must strive to put people back at the centre of our communities.
In 2013, I caught a glimmer of the potential of a political leader understanding the importance of community engagement when I was appointed to the Premier of South Australia’s newly formed Community Engagement Board. How refreshing – a leader of a political party seeking advice on genuine community engagement from specialists! The image overleaf shows me, with His Excellency the Honourable Hieu Van Le AC and Kate Simpson at one of our regular meetings. Sadly, in 2014 the same Premier announced that as part of government reform to improve efficiency, every government board and committee would be abolished unless it could demonstrate that it had an essential purpose that could not be fulfilled in an alternative way. The Community Engagement Board was no more, and instead the Government turned to its own internal resources to engage directly with communities.
