course, my studies were about approaches of health promotion. However, those approaches equally apply to community engagement.
While I was reading about different political approaches to health promotion, I was aware of my own political leanings. I’ve always found myself very much in the centre of the political spectrum. Perhaps this is because I spent years being an independent facilitator or advocate. Or perhaps I’ve always been conscious that my client, the government, could change in an instant at any election and my business always needed to be ready to adapt to suit the policies of the current term. Or perhaps it is that my Dad’s parents were traditional working-class conservative ‘Tory’ supporters, and my Mum’s parents were socialist Labour party supporters. Or maybe I just want to be liked by everybody.
Then again, maybe it’s that I’ve always had fairly centralist view of the world. Whatever the reason, I believe it’s important to consider that community engagement is not about political persuasion. Left or right doesn’t matter as much as whether we are authentic and principled in the work we do.
These days, governments cannot decide whether or not they engage communities. Twenty-first century communities ask to be involved. At times, they demand it. They want governments to be representative of them and their needs and to listen to what they are saying. In recent years working with both left-wing and right-wing governments (and the left, right and central factions within them), I notice that engagement methodologies remain pretty much the same.
In the same Naidoo and Wills book, I discovered Dahlgren and Whitehead’s Determinants of Health model (1991). That was my second huge revelation. The model explained, layer by layer, the influences on an individual’s health. Starting at a very individual level, the authors explained that the first layers of influence are our age, gender, and other hereditary factors. These are closely followed by lifestyle factors, such as levels of support and influence within communities which can sustain or damage health. The next layer is about a person’s living and working conditions, as well as their access to facilities and services. And the final layer notes the importance of general socio-economic, cultural, and environmental conditions.
This model referred specifically to layers of influence on a person’s health. However, for the young Becky, it opened me to a depth of understanding of the concept of ‘community’ that I’d never considered. It communicated that a person doesn’t simply live in a community. There are so many layers to that person’s interactions with that community, whether the layers are of local or global significance.
These days, I use this model to help me consider which layer a particular community project or initiative is addressing. For example, a group of volunteers who meet to plant trees in their neighbourhood once a month may be addressing both the layer regarding their living and working conditions (providing more greenery, better shade). Equally, they may be addressing broader environmental conditions (such as tackling climate change). They are also, of course, individually working on their own lifestyle factors (being active, meeting new people) and building social and community networks.
These layers fascinated me so much that in 2013, I developed my own version of this model. I’d been working intensively across South Australia with several different government clients on a range of different topics. And one of the joys of being a community engagement specialist is that you get to hear a lot of interesting stuff!
What I heard, particularly from people in metropolitan Adelaide, was repetitious. It didn’t matter whether my client was the health department asking me to seek contributions for a new policy, or a Council asking me to engage with people to design a new garden as part of the Adelaide parklands, or the Premier’s Department working on a new Strategic Plan for the entire State, people were telling me things that were deeply interlinked. Locating the common themes within a model based on the layers within Dahlgren and Whitehead’s Determinants of Health provided an ideal platform for my analysis and I put together the ‘Healthy Communities’ graphic below in Image 6.
Now, in 2021, I experience much joy (and equally much frustration) when I consider that these same matters are still being discussed by people in metropolitan Adelaide today. I bet this applies to the whole of the world. We have been talking about these issues for a long time.
The third and final big concept that inspired me during my Graduate Diploma studies was Maslow’s famous Hierarchy of Needs. When I studied Maslow’s model, it had not been the subject of as much scrutiny as it is today. I learned the basics and they really affected how I looked at my work – and my life. Maslow’s original Hierarchy of Needs built on my understanding and values that a person cannot reach their full potential if their basic needs are not met.
We cannot achieve self-esteem if we lack a feeling of belonging. We cannot feel like we belong without having our safety needs met. And before we have our safety needs meet, we need our basic physiological needs met. I’ve since learned that Maslow’s Hierarchy has been critiqued over the decades. And with good cause. I have a close friend who lost his livelihood and home in the last few years. Yet he still holds the ability to seek out deep learning, understanding, and self-awareness; often regularly helping others by way of a higher state of transcendence. This experience reminds me that the hierarchy is not necessarily as straightforward (or constraining) as it seems.
The model has also evolved over time to include cognitive, aesthetic, and transcendent needs, as shown in image 7.¹⁰ Not only did Maslow’s model further enrich my deep understanding, as did other models, providing a much deeper understanding of individuals and community, but it also reminded me of another of my passions in the world of community engagement… the basic need of a sense of belonging.
As with my fascination with a real-life game of Sim City and the relationships among everyone living in communities of place, in her book Belonging,¹¹ Toko-pa Turner notes that, as humans, we are remembering how to be an ecosystem. She suggests that we must look after each other, reconstituting the world through many small contributions, collaborations, and general sense of togetherness.
I believe that good community engagement not only contributes to considered decision-making (that in turn leads to thriving communities), but also when community engagement is done well, it can build a strong sense of belonging. Maslow’s model confirms as it was for me that feeling like you belong somewhere isn’t just a ‘nice-to-have’ feeling, but a critical need for our overall well-being as individuals.
Health promotion was good for me and I was good for it. I loved the food and health-related community projects. Working across the county of Gloucestershire meant traveling between meetings in the depths of the Forest of Dean with school principals to support establishment of breakfast clubs, to visiting the urban suburbs of Gloucester to work with Neighbourhood Projects setting up food cooperatives so local people could bulk buy staple food items. I loved my work establishing the Gloucestershire Food in Schools group, a multi-disciplinary collective of professionals who met regularly to work on healthy eating initiatives in schools. Membership ranged from school nurses to principals, to qualified nutritionists and local GPs. There I learned about the importance of people meeting regularly together to tackle a community issue.
