‘Ordinary’ People doing Extraordinary Things

This article was sent to us by recently retired member of the CHEX team Elspeth Gracey. Elspeth started her working life in the NHS as a lab technician in the Department of Virology in Glasgow’s Western Infirmary. After 23 years in NHS laboratories she worked in East Africa with Voluntary Service Overseas.

Seeing at first-hand how communities worked collectively with few available resources she made a significant career change on her return to Scotland in 1996. Initially she took up post with a community-led health organisation in her home town of Clydebank, later she continued in community-led health, managing the Phoenix Community Health Project in Inverclyde.

Elspeth joined CHEX in 2001. This is her reflection on the current situation and how communities are responding.

The title statement of this piece may be claimed to be a fundamental tenet of Community Development. While health service staff tend to be the focus of our attention during a pandemic, all over the world so called ‘ordinary’ people are seeing what needs to be done and are working individually and together to do it. This is the basis of Community Development.

Throughout it all the existing inequalities within society are being exacerbated. Those who had least to start with are hardest hit. Those with greatest resources are better placed to weather the storm.  

Our political structures are also under scrutiny as almost never before. There is speculation that things may never be the same again, that we need a ‘new order’ in society, greater social justice and more fairness, greater resourcing of public services. For many this would be the best outcome. For others a return to the status quo is what they seek and expect. It will be interesting to see what actually happens. Hearing a Tory Prime Minister making statements like “There is such a thing as society” and praising NHS staff not born in the UK for saving his life, might provide some hope that fundamental change is possible.

Listening to the radio in the last week I heard somebody say “The Chancellor has not just found the Magic Money Tree, he has found a whole forest of them” – of course we don’t yet understand what the economic impact of that will be. One can only hope that the response will never take us back to austerity which in my opinion meant we were starting from a more poorly resourced public sector than we might otherwise have done. It seems possible that the wider public and their political representatives are now alerted to the need for adequate resourcing of the services upon which we all rely.

Those in their professional roles who are in direct ‘battle’ to save lives are rightly applauded. But less well followed, lauded and understood are the millions of acts of kindness, neighbourliness and collective effort to support and keep safe those most vulnerable within our communities.

Communities respond

Within the CHEX network many organisations were already responding to community need. They already provided support to try and redress the balance that inequalities bring. Community Centres providing cooking on a budget classes, food banks and opportunities to learn together, access to the internet for welfare benefit claimants; mental health organisations supporting those in recovery and helping to prevent deteriorating mental health; environmental organisations, parent support groups, youth organisations, older people’s support, LGBT organisations, BME organisations and groups supporting the rights of disabled and sensory impaired people; others dealing with addictions, homelessness, domestic abuse. The scope of community development and health is wide.

Now we are seeing communities developing further to respond to a global crisis each in their own unique way bring to bear their knowledge of what is needed locally, and they are organising around the knowledge and skills they have to meet the needs identified. Counselling services are provided by phone or video links, foodbanks are delivering packages to people’s homes, youth organisations connecting with young people through social media and video links. Their creativity and flexibility is endless. For detailed examples look at Scotland’s Third Sector Lab and the Communities Channel Scotland site for the latest on how the community and voluntary sector are responding to the current crisis.

What is most striking for me is how new groups are forming and those never involved before find they are able to meet the needs of neighbours some of whom they may never have even spoken to before. Those isolated at home realise that they can help even from the confines of self-isolation, here is just one example.

One young mother of 4 living in a rural village of 800 people in the Highlands realised that a more structured approach was needed and so from her self-isolation, a lone parent with her children, she organised a database which would match volunteers to people in need. She recruited her neighbours who leafletted the whole village providing two phone numbers; one to register volunteers and a second to register the requests of those in need of help. The phones pass on a 48 hour rota to those willing to take the calls. Through the database she could then organise the required service through the volunteer most suited to the task required. This provided the village with a more cohesive approach and as one resident said, “It was easier to ask the project for help than to approach people I knew without knowing if they were able to help or not.” The project has all the volunteers it needs and they provide services for many people in their community who would otherwise have struggled in isolation. This is just one example of the power of people working together to meet the needs of their community.

Dealing with the impact

Now we face the most serious need the world has faced in living memory. It is brought to us by such a small thing, a virus, a form of life SO small that it defies imagination to quantify just exactly how small each viral particle actually is. Yet despite it’s literally microscopic size its impact could hardly be more gargantuan, thousands have died, tens of thousands more are ill and the impact on millions of lives is yet to be determined and has inevitably changed the course of history.

Now there are so many examples of people getting together to help the plight of others that almost everybody should be able to provide an example. In the past those of us working in Community Development have from time to time found it hard to explain to the uninitiated exactly how Community Development works or the importance of the impact on both individuals and communities but now it is my hope that so much will be known about it through direct experience that the vast majority of the population will require no explanation because they will have seen it happening at first hand.

In anticipation of my retirement from CHEX/SCDC I reflected on what it was about community development that was so powerful. I came to the conclusion that while the most effective power behind it is collective action, the power of the many to resolve issues which only they fully understand. I realised that within that the catalyst for action is down to so called ‘ordinary people’ galvanising others into action. Whether people within a community group or organisation are natural leaders of followers it is the ‘whole,’ the collective action that is the key and that gets the job done and results in positive change.

Personal perspective

From a personal perspective there is a strange circularity which encompasses my working life because I began my work nearly 50 years ago in a Virology lab. Virology was a relatively new discipline and I was the first person to be employed in that hospital to provide diagnostic virology services. 

From a scientific point of view the identification of the virus, development of tests and exploration of vaccine is happening today at speeds unimaginable in 1970. The use of technology, social media and sophisticated communication systems which allow the sharing of data across countries and the collaboration of science, medicine and critical care staff has rarely been so important. The combined effort in the front line is visible as we all wait with baited breath to hear that we have ‘turned the corner’ that COVID-19 is ‘under control’ and that we can start the first steps back to what we hope will be our normal lives.

For me in common with many thousands, possibly millions of others life will never be the same. For me, by comparison to global events my life was due to change in a relatively small way. I have ceased to be employed. For others the changes now underway are much more significant. They might include the loss of loved ones, across all age spans. There will be relationships that couldn’t withstand the strain, similarly there will be businesses, large and small that will not survive. 

Whatever the fall out of this most catastrophic global event there is no doubt that community responses will play a vital part in responding to and rebuilding the new challenges ahead. While I am no longer in paid employment to support community development, when this ends and I am not pre-occupied with dealing with the personal challenges the current crisis brings, I look forward to involving myself with my community through local organisations to make my contribution to a collective response in making this place a better place to be.