What is community cohesion?

What is community cohesion? For me, it's when the informal help arrives before the official help comes knocking ...

Somebody has to notice the curtains aren't drawn, the post has piled up, changes of routine - and then be prepared to act.

I was pretty housebound last year. The garden ran riot. When I emerged, blinking, one day to cut the grass, the neighbors - good people, professional, busy (like me) said: "We weren't sure whether there was something wrong."

The offer to take the kids while ... to lend a few quid to keep the loan sharks off your back ... even a free toot if (when) you're 'rattling.'

Someone is tuned in enough to notice - and then courageous enough to act. More and more 'neighborliness' seems an act of courage. The more disaffected and violent our neighborhoods become, the more difficult it becomes to reach out.

It's OK nodding at the school gates - and expressing some minimal level of contact with neighbors (see: the 'Involve' report, Everybody Needs Good Neighbours). But then we need to be prepared to act.

I've worked in some pretty challenging environments: on the streets in so-called sink estates; and with people with substance mis-use problems.

What is community cohesion? The instinct to act.

I've worked with groups of young people. A twelve year old probably saved a fourteen years old girl's life when he dialed 999 on his mobile. She'd fallen unconscious in a drunken heap on a freezing night. He may not be able to answer a question like "What is Community Cohesion?" - but his instincts were great!

A neighborhood expressing more community cohesion might have asked how it was that that young woman had become her mother's sole drinking companion from an early age.

How does a community re-learn to value those instincts? How can we rebuild sufficient trust to take action?

Last night a friend called me and asked me for dinner/supper (that's ''tea' in the north-east!). I got to stop work early; had a nice meal; decided to walk the two miles there and back - I can walk safely where I live. It's up hill, so I got a bit of a work out ... all good, healthy recommended activities.

Out of the blue, she'd been sent the catalogue of "Hard Rain - our headlong collision with nature" an exhibition of photographs, illustrating Dylan's "A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall.")

Maybe, as we try to answer that question, What is community Cohesion? or seek to define community cohesion we can adapt the environmental slogan, Think Globally, Act Locally. Can we come up with an accessible definition of community cohesion in the same way?

Back to the story, which starts - for me - with a more social lesson than an environmental one.

What is Community Cohesion? A willingness to embrace difference

The author/photographer had been lost on the edge of the Sahara. He sets his experience against the first moon landing. His critical experience occurred in 1969:

While these great events unfolded, I was lost in a lunar landscape myself: the southern edge of the Sahara desert. I was rescued by a Tuareg nomad on a camel...

He took me to his companions, sat me down on a rock, and went into his hut. He reappeared with an umbrella, a cassette player, and two pieces of wood. He rubbed the sticks together and made a fire ... we had a nice cup of tea.

[I love that. How many neighbourly heart-to-hearts start with, "I'll put the kettle on. We'll have a nice cuppa-tea."]

He warmed the batteries and turned on the cassette player. Bob Dylan sang, "A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall."

He sounded like he was singing to an empty world. I'm surrounded by dignified, graceful people from another age - sitting by a fire lit by friction ...
Mark Edwards and Lloyd Timberlake, Hard Rain
I'm not particularly religious, but the story of The Good Samaritan comes to mind. Jesus had been asked, "Who is my neighbour?" if I remember correctly. He told the story, then asked a question himself: "Who was neighbour to this man?"

I noticed "took me to his companions". If I ever looked like intervening in some ugly behavior at the school gates, my kids would pretend they weren't with me!

We need to know how our peers will respond if we choose to extend a helping hand, Will a willingness to offer support to someone who is 'different' in whatever way alienate us from our own communities of families, friends, peers?

The issue is at least 2,000 years old then. A community cohesion definition may be elusive. Life doesn't have a simple definition, but we all recognize the difference betwen the living and the dead.

What is community cohesion? An emergent quality

It occurs to me in writing this that "Community Cohesion" is a result of something else. A definition of community cohesion will differ markedly from one place to another.

It's hard to answer the question, What is Community Cohesion? with a succinct definition.

That's probably a good thing: it will encourage careful work to discover what is meaningful to the residents of a particular neighbourhood. In that process of discovery, what is important and meaningful will come from opening up new channels of communication.

It ought to ensure that the question is left open for people to define in their own ways, in their own neighbourhoods.

In our information economy, corporations (communities themselves) of all sizes have learned that valuable, untapped knowledge is secreted away in the experiences of employees at all levels in the organization.

The most flexible and progressive have been finding ways to expose this knowledge and use it for many years now. The notion of 'distributed leadership' - that everyone in the organization is a potential leader - will transpose into a nighborhood setting.

This doesn't happen by edict from the top. Slogans don't work. Mission statements written by the senior management team don't work.

Increasingly best performance - and, I believe, sustainable performance - will be demonstrated by organizations that ruthlessly pursue openness and accountability.

What is Community Cohesion? - and what it isn't!

Northern Rock espoused a "No Blame" culture.

Had it been the lived reality of the communities of people making up the organization, the problems piling could have been confronted. However, the lived reality of those who could challenge was that it was unsafe to do so. The rest, we know.

Contrast that with a previously failing local authority, now one of the fastest improving local authorities in the UK. It has achieved this by adopting a policy of open accountability and the development of a culture of distributed leadership.

The meeting of 60 or 70 local authority managers I attended yesterday had - for me - a quiet buzz of real confidence and determination. The small talk I was privy to acknowledged fear of change, the new, the different and of increasing levels of responsibility.

It also acknowledged that feelings of vulnerability in a new role would be adequately supported; that it would be exciting to lead rather than manage; that you get out what you put in.

All a million miles away from the passivity that much top-down leadership engenders.

My concluding thought in addressing the question, What is community cohesion? is this. Wherever people gather together in organized groups there is scope for differences to become polarized and entrenched.

There are always risks that conflict will waste time, energy, money and resources - and lead to more polarization. A vicious circle.

It will be defined by the qualities of interactions and relationships, activites, clubbing together.

"What is Community Cohesion? - a personal view"

Robert Fordham, May 2008