Principle Seven: Do things ‘with’ people, not ‘to’ them or ‘for’ them

The challenge ahead of us is how to rebuild strong, healthy and therapeutic local communities in this strange new world to which we are struggling to adapt, because the best predictor of both physical and mental health is always relational connectedness.

A good multi-family, multi-generational community is a healing community, one which is filled with countless informal therapeutic moments and interactions. There may be no formal therapy sessions, but there’s a myriad of social connections that together build resilience, wisdom and hope. Most of the world’s very best support and healing happens naturally without professional involvement in small communities – it always has.

Poverty will never be solved by programmes. A caring society springs not from the diktats of Whitehall, but from real day-to-day contact with, and concern for, our neighbours, and involvement with local community. Government can do certain things very well, but the fact is that because local community groups are on the ground and are trusted, they are able to respond faster and more sensitivity to real needs, and to do so with a level of knowledge and care that is impossible for statutory bodies to achieve. Because of this, they are far more effective in their work than the expensive initiatives of the government will ever be.

The problem is that the state doesn’t like anything that isn’t formal, and communities are by their very nature informal.

Though children and families exist in an ecosystem of relationships, statutory children’s and family services often bypass these relationships and act in isolation from them. Too often their work feels like something ‘done to us’ rather than a healthy partnership with us. ‘Nothing about us, without us’. This over-professionalisation of support has not simply corroded community engagement and ownership, but also the very sense of community itself. Instead of deepening and strengthening local ownership and enhancing relationships, it has disempowered and robbed families of a sense of honour and dignity.

We have paralysed informal community networks by professionalising care. We can obsess over the minutiae of health and safety, safeguarding and risk assessments, but our lack of investment in building a network of informal care, combined with under-resourced professional care has created huge risk and destroys both health and safety.

Even when professionals consult with a community, it’s often a tokenistic, box-ticking exercise rather than an authentic process for listening. This simply disempowers them and leaves the community feeling unheard rather than listened to and valued. Genuine community consultation should create a tangible sense of community participation, engagement, and collaboration around what’s really needed, and how any service could be best provided.

Our current over-reliance on professionals is not only a therapeutic and relational disaster, it’s also a resource disaster. The two issues play right into one another. Not only does it ignore the strengths and bypass the informal networks in the community, negating its insights and wasting its talent; but worse, it runs the huge risk of angering and alienating those it was designed to help. Partnership enhances community robustness: an over reliance on professionalism destroys it.

‍‘It takes a village to raise a child,’ is one of the most over-quoted phrases of the last decade. But our problem is that, although we sign up to the doctrine, at the very same time we have failed to invest in building or supporting that philosophy, and instead have simply left things to a bunch of paid professionals.

Until we all understand this and are prepared to do something about it, we are lost!