Dear Friends and Colleagues
I was asked by Christine Smith, Chair of the Association, to write some thoughts about our situation as a community of practice as I approach my retirement from Manchester Metropolitan University at the end of August 2020 and as we face the challenges ahead. It was good to be asked to do this. This is a moment replete with danger and not only from this terrible virus. Yet many I believe will see it also as full of opportunity : those who voted for Brexit and ‘to get Brexit done’ perhaps see it as a time for greater freedom and liberalisation. Those interested in community see it as a time to affirm ‘a new normal’ and to ‘build back better’ and perhaps there is some common ground across those previously divided by the Brexit agenda about this.
I recognise that the proposal to rebuild the postwar social democratic consensus, which was the substance of Labour’s December 2019 manifesto, including the careful and ambitious plans to rebuild a national and publicly funded Youth Service were rejected in December - only for us to stand clapping key workers in March April and May. Last December I had (and not for the first time) a powerful sense of the ending of that consensus. In June I can say that it still has power to haunt us.
So, now where are we and where do we go? We are engaged in a period of reflection, and for some of us grief. One of the early stages of grief is denial and I recognise a desire to deny the consequences of where the events and struggles since the 2016 Referendum (since the 1970’s some would say) have left us. But denial will not serve us well and is only an initial defence in the face of defeat and loss. We also face the uncertainty concerning young people’s experiences of education, their opportunities for association and connection, which the experience of Covid19 is amplifying.
There are three challenges I would like to reflect on, and some resources of hope I can offer, which can be taken up by all, whatever way they voted in the long ago past of the Brexit Referendum.
The first challenge is the resurgence of xenophobia and racism
The first challenge is the undoubted resurgence of xenophobia and racism which was interwoven with the ‘Brexit’ narrative, accompanied by a resurgence of other hate crimes. Friends in Manchester have spoken to me of an increase in the experience of ‘being othered’ and abused , as refugees walking in the park, as an older woman waiting for a taxi alone, as a butch young woman travelling alone on the tram. Others have spoken of their belief that the victory of Brexit meant that their presence is rejected and that they are not wanted here. These include, just as examples, a British-born Pakistani-heritage Muslim friend who experiences taunts about her headscarf on public transport and a friend from Rwanda who gained the right to remain as a refugee at least 10 years ago and who now works for a People with HIV/AIDS support charity. It seems likely that the racism and xenophobia which was unleashed in the Brexit referendum will continue to be fuelled by the Alt-Right on social media. But at least it is now being named and comprehensively called out in the resurgent and widely supported Black Lives Matter movement. We have many resources to draw on, looking to our roots as youth and community workers. Many of today’s discussions – for example about colour-blind practice – are ones I heard first among radical youth workers in the 1980’s. We can continue to work with and as allies and accomplices, supporting the human rights of all, defending ourselves and each other against violent attack, and building solidarity across communities as the movements to decolonise education, oppose incarceration and move police out of educational establishments gather pace. We need to give active support to anti-racist movements such as Hope not Hate, the Stephen Lawrence Foundation and Football Unites, Racism Divides ( a campaign started many years ago by Youth Workers in Sheffield) as well as to movements and projects which elevate BAME communities: Black Lives Matter; the Black Saturday Schools which emerged from the earlier moments of struggle and are still going strong; the Windrush Defenders campaign to name but a few.
The second challenge is the recognition of the importance of solidarity
The second challenge is embodied in the recognition of the importance of solidarity and the return to community development and grassroots organising. Grassroots activism will continue to be essential for a number of reasons and will be turned to by people of all political persuasions. This has been shown fully by the immediate emergence of street level self-help during the pandemic, but the harsh reality is that need has deepened dramatically. Foodbank use is up 300% in the Longsight / Levenhulme / Ardwick (not particularly affluent) part of Manchester where I live since March.
We have a good resource base to offer here and the essentials of community development which have been fundamental to youth and community work education programmes in the past need to be recovered now. Young people must not be forcibly isolated from their communities or taught through youth work programmes to see their families and the communities from which they come as essentially pathological or problematic. This is particularly important for those living in poverty, and who come from communities which are rendered as ‘other’, especially perhaps through Islamophobia. Terrible evidence of the effects of pathologising communities by large institutions like the Justice system, schools and the NHS continues. It is even being recognised by scientists as underpinning the unequal effect of Covid19 on BAME communities. And, even though the wealth of communities and their assets do not reside only in their financial and economic means, the lack of money and resource and the consequent lack of capacity is severe in many parts of the country, especially in the places where youth and community workers seek to engage. We need to build living networks that cross the rural/town/city and Brexit/Remain divides and we are well placed through our Universities to support projects which can build and support such networks.
We know that a sense of anger at the neglect of particular places has grown, alongside the longstanding loss of traditional forms of employment and community. As youth and community workers we can contribute to the celebration of and ways of valuing the local and particular, the places and the environments, the nature and the cultures, in all their complexity and difference, that make life worth living. Some young climate activists are using a word that is new to me: ‘solastalgia’. A grief for the loss of place, for what is being lost through the impact of the climate emergency. Such grief is accompanied by a fierce joy in taking action on behalf of life.
The third challenge is sustaining our internationalism
Which brings me to the third challenge: sustaining our internationalism. These renewed forms of community development will be very limited if they are excluded from international conversations and connection. Covid19 has brought us renewed insights into this. It is surely evident now if it was not before how profoundly the local and the global are interconnected. Many important projects for youth workers in recent years have emerged from the Erasmus programme, and if we lose access to these as a result of Brexit, we will have to work to develop new forms of partnership, whilst also valuing those connections which have re-emerged in the Anglophone world and across the Commonwealth. There are some signs that street work and we UK youth workers call ‘Detached Work’ may be the basis of such international alliances and so are the many UN supported programmes and initiatives and the associated calendar of Human Rights days throughout the year, such as International Day of the Girl Child, Black History Month, Twelve Days to End Violence against Women, IDAHOBIT (International Day against Homophobia, Bi Intersex and Transphobia) and so on.
Omitted from these UN Programmes of course is an emphasis on social class. But the class divide underpins all our engagement and work and no one experience of inequality can be addressed without recognising the others in which it is caught up. Again there is a good deal of knowledge and experience in our field of practice to draw on here, which deserves to be brought together and shared.
Arundhati Roy has written that ‘the pandemic is a portal. A gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it dragging the carcasses of our prejudices and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.’ In making ready to fuel our imagination, we need all our capacities for independent learning, on our own behalves as well as in order to nurture this in our communities. Arts practices of many kinds are being generative of hope and imagination across transnational projects.
This is the hope we can see in the engagement and activism among students and young voters. One important source of renewal for the civil rights movements (which have shaped so much of our practice) has always been student activism. When I heard some of the recent Labour campaigning dismissed as ‘student politics’ I reflected on just how much we owe to ‘student politics’ from the 1960’s onwards. After all, the Civil Rights movements were ‘student politics’ and so were The Women’s Liberation Movement and the Black Consciousness Movement. The Arab Spring was a youth movement; Anti-Putin protests were led by art students….. The alliance between such movements and community development based youth work and adult education could be strong again.
The resurgence of activism for the earth and the creation is rooted in an extraordinary joyfulness which emerges to counter the despair so many feel about the reckless path of denial of the climate emergency and species extinction. This joyfulness has always been a central motivator for a counter-practice which seeks to build the contribution of the commons, of community and sustainability to imagine a better, fairer and more liveable world. It would be wonderful if our newsletters and social media could be places where we regularly share our experience of such practices. ‘In the dark times, will there be singing? Yes, there will be singing/About the dark times’, wrote the poet Bertolt Brecht. I have always found hearing the stories from practice in youth and community work an immense encouragement. I hope we can hear each others’ songs and stories very loudly in the year ahead.
We exist at the margins: and this is our greatest source of hope
I was so very moved at the wonderful compass I was given as a ‘thankyou’ from TAGPALYCW with the many kind and thoughtful words from colleagues in our small yet mighty community. Paul Fenton, National Officer, brought it over to Manchester in early March just before the lockdown, as we marked the end of a local charity, Voluntary Youth Manchester and celebrated the Equality and Diversity Toolkit we had bequeathed as our last gift to the sector. It is inscribed in tiny writing with Robert Frost’s beautiful poem ‘The Road Not Taken’ which of course speaks of the ‘road less travelled by.’ All of us involved in the Youth and Community Work world are on that less travelled road in some ways. We exist at the margins. And this is our greatest source of hope, as it gives us the freedom to move lightly, to imagine creatively and to know that our only power can lie in the truth that ‘I am because we are.’ So I must return the gratitude….it comes back to all of you many times stronger because we all know that no one does any of this work alone and that most of our strength is in the fact that what we do, we do collectively. I have found of course a lot of frustration but also an enormous amount of joy in being involved in this field of work and I expect and imagine I will somehow find ways to keep connection as I cannot quite imagine who I would be without it.
Janet Batsleer
July 10th 2020