Removing the roadblocks: what can we learn from the last crisis?
This event on 11 October 2022 is one of a series looking at how we can unblock the roadblocks, where we’ve heard that many people at every level can play a part in driving change by:
Challenging and changing whatever stands in the way, including the deep-seated assumptions that can prevent us from being our best selves.
Calling out inequalities and abuses of power, and making sure everyone can participate on their own terms.
Assuming the best in others and seeing difference, conflict and division as an opportunity to pause, seek to understand, and find a fresh way.
But we’ve also heard that resistance to change is widespread, whether through culture, systems or practices. So how can we get better at overcoming the resistance and removing the roadblocks?
On this occasion, the specific question we explored was what can we learn from the last crisis to help us tackle the next. Our thought leader for this topic, Neil Denton - a community mediator and Professor in Practice at Durham University’s After Disasters Network - explained Britain is facing crisis after crisis, lurching from the pandemic to the cost-of-living crisis and a recession, without having healed from the last, and the effects are deepening divisions. Finding space for that healing is important and there are also lessons to be learnt from the last crisis to help us tackle the next, as set out in A Sense of Connection, a report by the Relationships Project. He was joined as opening speakers by Christine Frazer from Age UK Gateshead, who gave moving examples of how that community had supported each other during the Covid crisis - ‘the light than shone during the pandemic’, and Grace Sodzi-Smith from the Social Change Agency, who spoke about the valuable support they were giving to mutual aid groups to enable them to flourish.
Here are some of the key points made by the speakers and participants in the breakout groups and plenary discussion:
‘In our darkest days we saw the brightest version of ourselves’ - not volunteering but helping each other, and we still have that memory and can rekindle that spirit.
Many people want to move on from the pandemic but we cannot move forward if we ignore the pain and distress that some people are still experiencing. Christine told us about the people who were still angry and upset by what they’d experienced - including a man who hadn’t been able to be present as his wife gave birth to their stillborn child, a woman who hadn’t been able to attend her best friend’s funeral and another who depends on a foodbank that is now closing. Professionals who are helping people in these situations are also experiencing mental health difficulties. What she’d found through her work in supporting and listening to people in Gateshead is that it helps to gather people together to find common cause - in the case of the individuals she described, they were brought together in a mental health support workshop, learning about mental health in order to help themselves and support others.
Many deprived communities are suffering from deep-seated trauma that goes back much further than Covid.
You need to keep fighting the fire as well as working for a brighter future with a sense of hope.
Burn out and compassion fatigue is common especially amongst first responders and organisations need to be much more aware of this - training can help professionals recognise the signs and techniques for managing stress. ‘Unless you put your oxygen mask on first you can’t help others’.
Larger organisations have the capacity to provide vital support to small-scale mutual aid groups. Grace told us about how the Social Change Agency was providing such groups with banking services, to make it easier for them to raise money transparently, and other tools, including listening and creating a space to have conversations and give advice and support. We heard that this was kind of support was also happening in other places and could be a model that could be adopted more widely.
Time is needed to allow for healing, with permission to be sad and negative. Just as we come together as a nation in exciting times, for example, the London Olympics, so we should also be able to do in times of grief.
Strong communities are critical - those who stick together recover best. Relationships are the foundation of communities and need to be nurtured in order to build resilience at a time of crisis. Relationship building needs to happen in the good times so that they are there in times of crisis.
We need to design stronger services, not keep on repairing them.