DIY Community Action by Richardson Liz

Author:Richardson, Liz [Richardson, Liz]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781847420848
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Bristol University Press
Published: 2008-03-12T00:00:00+00:00

The wider community

The litmus test of a group’s effectiveness is whether it is having a noticeable impact on its local community. It is important that the group can point to ways in which they are interacting positively with their local community. The success of community self-help is dependent on the participation of the local community, through taking part in the activities organised by the group or helping to run those activities (for example, see Home Office, 1999). Like any business or institution, a community group is not sustainable if there is little or no demand for its services. This means that the groups had to have good intelligence gathering, and were forced to be close to the ‘customer’. The projects that worked best took a proactive approach to reaching residents, and relied on face-to-face contact.

Nor is it sustainable in the longer term if people are not being drawn into more active participation in helping to run the group or some of its activities. It is also important how the group is perceived to be making a difference by other residents in the community. The community should be able to identify with the group; they should feel it is their group and be interested in and support what it is doing.

Links to the outside

Community groups are more likely to succeed if they are operating in a favourable external environment. This is partly dependent on their ability to win external backing and to persuade other agencies of their worth.

Do groups need to have all the attributes?

But what about the community group that is delivering substantial benefits to the local community, but is not necessarily functioning very well as a team? There are many examples of community groups, and indeed other organisations in the public and private sector, that have ‘dictatorial’ leaders, internal fragmentation and poor internal communication that still achieve results. By itself, this might suggest that team working is not important, provided there is strong leadership. However, an emphasis on delivery above all else can obscure the other costs that poor team working places on these groups, such as a high turnover of members, which adversely affects a group’s ability to operate in the longer term. Over-reliance on one or two key people also makes the group more vulnerable, because it can place undue pressure on these particular individuals and yet make the group’s survival very dependent on their continuing involvement. Thus, a strong team is likely to make a group more sustainable, even if it is not essential to achieve results in the shorter term. Figure 6.1 shows these different models of leadership in groups with different levels of openness and inclusivity.

Figure 6.1: Leadership models

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