Storytelling helps overcome community conflict
March 29, 2005
Martin Dudley has beaten me to it with an item on his libraries blog about a community cohesion project I've been working on with Drew Mackie and colleagues in Pendle, Lancashire. Thanks for the nudge Martin - I had better catch up.
The original brief was to undertake an attitude survey of what people thought of their neighbours and the place they live, and also map who was doing what to improve "cohesion". I should say there's not a lot of agreement about just what constitutes cohesion, but the downside is that if you don't have it, there's a chance of serious disturbance, as some towns in Lancashire experienced in 2001.
The official Home Office version is that a cohesive community is one where:
- there is a common vision and a sense of belonging for all communities
- the diversity of people’s different backgrounds and circumstances is appreciated and positively valued
- those from different backgrounds have similar life opportunities
- strong and positive relationships are being developed between people from different backgrounds in the workplace, in schools and within neighbourhoods.
Drew and I thought this would be difficult to explain on the doorstep, so we proposed to Pendle Borough Council and others in the Pendle Partnership that we instead invite groups to create fictitious (but believable) characters, develop their life stories, and then analyse who they trusted in times of difficulty - for example friends, family, work mates, their faith group (if they belonged to one) or public agencies. Drew, with Jas Atwal and Tinka Hübl, did a terrific job in getting a wide range of Pendle residents to each spend an hour or two in groups developing the stories. We were helped enormously by local organisations who took the storytelling kits we developed and ran sessions themselves.
Drew analysed all the issues that emerged and ran a prioritisation exercise to help policymakers plan their programmes.
Not only did our clients support this approach, they came up with the bright idea of extending storytelling into the local paper through a set of cartoon strips Myths over Pendle. As the council says:
Funded by East Lancashire Together, an initiative committed to bringing together different communities, the strips are designed to help bust 'myths' and improve community awareness and understanding of different cultures, ages and backgrounds in a friendly but funny way.
Pendle has the advantage of being able to call on local cartoonist Peter Rigg who does some rather more biting work for Private Eye. Here's one of his Pendle strips.
We had a lot of fun on the project, and have now been invited across to Blackburn to do something similar. It really confirmed to me that it is worth challenging a conventional brief, and suggesting something different to the client if you really believe in it. They may just go for it.
You can download our report here 4M pdf
Update
Archive of strips now available here
Myths over Pendle wins East Lancashite CreativityWorks award
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