“A healthy social life is found only, when in the mirror of each soul the whole community finds its reflection, and when in the whole community the virtue of each one is living” Rudolf Steiner
At the weekend, I participated in a meditation retreat under the sacred Mother Mountain of Gulaga, on the Far South Coast of NSW, Australia. Our retreat facilitators, Tanmaya and Ro Beaumont, articulated an intention of celebrating interconnection and diversity, within self and community. I emerged from the retreat with a stronger sense of both self and community and an unexpected confirmation of Evolve’s recent business name change to EVOLVE COMMUNITIES.
Community – derived from the Old French communité which is derived from the Latin communitas (cum, “with/together” + munus, “gift”),
Community = Together a Gift
The gift(s) of Community are far reaching – both communities of interest and place.
My greatest inspiration and a person that I most admire for the way in which she ‘walks her talk’ of community, also a dear friend and colleague, is Dr Alison McIntosh. In the 90s, Alison and I worked on a ‘Development Strategy’ for Wingham NSW, a recommendation of which was the establishment of a community driven action group (WAG). Alison, with her husband Noel, have been instrumental in keeping WAG alive, and over a decade later, improvements are still being made by WAG to the social and physical fabric of Wingham. During this time, Alison has undertaken a Doctoral thesis and post doctoral research exploring, inter alia, communities of place and communities of interest, wellbeing and belonging, resilience, masculinity and violence, and migration.
I asked Alison, if she had a minute to share one of her greatest lessons from this comprehensive and complex research, what would she say. This was her reply:
“Actively engaging with other people through community enriches you as a human being; creating tolerance, acceptance and understanding. As a professional, engaging in your own communities (of both place and practice) will increase empathy and understanding, enriching your own practice and work”.
My work over the past twenty years has been about community. As an Urban and Regional Planner in the late 80s, I despaired that I and my peers spoke of community as the ‘other’, a disparate entity that we were separate from – ‘them’ and ‘us’. I think many of our failures in urban planning result from this, and a subsequent failure to build infrastructure that creates and nourishes liveable communities.
In my more recent work with the Yalata Aboriginal Community in South Australia, I have been reminded of the importance of allowing space and time within a community to acknowledge grief and what is. The Yalata community consists mainly of Anangu people who lived in the spinifex country far to the north prior to their forcible removal to Yalata in 1952. In the 1950s, traiditional lands of the Anangu were used for Atomic Testing by the British Government of the day. There is a beautiful book sharing this story, “Maralinga the Anangu Story” (2009), written by the Yalata and Oak Valley communities with well respected Australian Author, Christobel Mattingley:
“The people were deeply troubled about what was happening to their own lands, and acutely unsettled by their forced removal to this alien country. Its grey powdery limestone was so different from the red earth of the desert that they knew and loved. Homesick, and sad, they described the new country as pana tjilpi, greyearth. They said it made their hair go grey, like tjilpi, old people. They said it made them old to live there”.
(Yalata and Oak Valley Communities, with Christobel Mattingley, p35)
I am assisting the Yalata Community to develop their plan for how they wish to care for their Country. While the deep grief is palatable when you visit this community, so too is they joy of children and life, two generations of children now being born at Yalata. As I visit the schools, health centre, art centre and other community gathering places to learn about the Communities’ desires for Country, my understanding and ability to synthesise what I am told into a land management plan is enriched for knowing the story of this Community. It is also enriched for being part of a range of community groups myself.
There is a growing body of research around the costs of long working hours to the community and social fabric. I remember being astounded when reading an article in the Sydney Morning Herald about a Lawyer and young mothers ‘guilt’ when she knocked off work for two hours at 6pm to take her son to soccer and then return to work.
It is easy to fall into the trap of taking on more work and I am as susceptible to this as the next person. I am now only getting to that point of factoring time with the community (whether a community of interest, volunteer group) above time ‘working’, while maintaining time with family as priority one. Of course, the desire for more ‘stuff’ or that home renovation needs to be balanced against the value of this time. However I think that a certain amount of time invested with community will have greater returns, not only for me as a professional (the focus of whose work is community) AND as a person. Not easy! Worth it though!