Our 'Getting to Know You' (GTKY) conversations have been very successful in letting people that are very different quickly discover how much they have in common and how much they care about community spirit. They are also very succesful in creating an energy and interest in getting involved and doing things together to build this sense of community. They are useful as a way of kick starting a new project such as a Parents Association in a school or a new Neighbourhood Watch meeting or as a way of building relationships in a group or context where people are together but are not communicating. Sometimes our Community Development worker can work with a group after a Community Conversation to support them in planning community activities together.
We can work more informally than this by leading initial icebreaking activities in a school playground for parents (for instance) or at large meetings where we work creatively to get conversation going and people mixing. Take a look through our recent events to see the various ways in which we work.
Here's just one of many examples.
'Our children mix so why don't we?!" Drew School, North Woolwich (December 2009)
In partnership with Steve, a Parent Governor at Drew School Primary School, North Woolwich, we ran two events that aimed to bring the school's parents together to learn more about each other. Both Steve and the school's Head were interested in seeing if parents would be interested in forming a 'Friends of the school group'. The school sent out a leaflet with every parent "Our children mix so why don't we?!"
At the first session 4 Mums came – 3 Nigerians and 1 Bengali. All four wanted to meet again and felt that it was important for parents to have an opportunity to get to know each other. At the second event 15 diverse parents came along, including Dads.
As always at our Getting To Know You events the first focus is on hearing personal examples from everyone about a time they experienced community spirit and the faciltiators help to draw out the elements of community spirit. Then the focus is forward and positive by asking the question "How can we bring this community spirit here?" and making up small groups to come up with both big ideas and small ideas. There were loads and loads of ideas for getting parents involved in the school and building relationships across families. Everyone had thoroughly enjoyed an Eid party run by the school and some had given this as their personal example of community spirit but there many other examples including when West Ham won the FA cup way back in the 80s.
Parents went into small groups (see picture) to see how they could bring their own community spirit examples into the school more often and as well as many excellent ideas for events, there was also a willingness on the part of everyone to get involved to help the events happen. After this meeting Steve led a planning meeting to set up a Friends of the School group and now this group is up and running!
