Q&A: Community action in Northern Ireland
This interview with Rachel Toner, Community Development Lead for Groundwork Northern Ireland, explores the themes from Groundwork’s latest report From the Ground Up: empowering communities through environmental action.
What’s your role at Groundwork Northern Ireland?
I’m the Community Development Lead and I love that title! The development aspect of working with the communities is really important to all of the staff here, whether it’s someone working on the finance side or working out on the ground – doing the ground work, if you like!
How would you describe Groundwork Northern Ireland’s approach to empowering communities?
Working with the community is something that runs through the heart of what we do. We’re very careful that when we’re working with communities, it’s not a top-down approach and we’re not going out in the communities and telling them “This is what you need”.
As an example, I work with Men’s Sheds in Northern Ireland and for such a small place there’s nearly 90 of them! Each shed can have anywhere between 30 to 50 members, so that’s quite a good amount of people spread across Northern Ireland. We’re keen to work with them to find out what they need – tell us openly and honestly what you need from us, and we’ll do that with you.
We take that time to build the relationship so there’s an honest dialogue. If something’s not working, we’ll take that feedback and say: “okay we’ve tried that and maybe it hasn’t worked this time around, we’ll try something different”. On the flip side, “okay, this worked really well, how can we make this continue to work even better? How can we adapt it?”.
Something I love is that we’re always connecting with other organisations, and we connect different community groups together as well, just by sometimes being a go-between.
Groundwork Northern Ireland does a lot of work around good relations between communities. How does this context inform your approach to community work?
The dynamic has probably changed quite a bit over the years, which is a good thing, but there still is that legacy of the Troubles and the good relations aspect of our work is very important.
A large part of that is the Beacons, which are a celebratory tool that can replace bonfires. We keep it very neutral for communities saying this is a tool that you can use all year round to celebrate anything – it could be Halloween, it could be anything – but it’s for all communities, we don’t market it to one or the other.
We recently did some work with young men asking, “what are the issues facing young men in Northern Ireland?”, not really expecting them to talk about issues of good relations. I think sometimes being a younger person you think you’re out of the Troubles or all of that has passed, but it hasn’t really – there are still issues of sectarianism, violence, traditions in some areas. We’re able to create that dialogue among young men and then we have that feedback and can go to funders and say: “okay, is there still that need there? How can we work on this? How can we maybe bring communities together to have these conversations?”
We also did a good relations programme with young adults with additional needs in a school in Belfast where we approached it in a different way. Rather than just being about Protestants and Catholics, we looked at how we can bring different communities together from all walks of life. We asked the young people, “how would you feel if someone judged you for your surname or how you look or the colour of your skin?”
How does getting involved in environmental action benefit communities in Northern Ireland?
That’s a big aspect of our work too! It comes in with the Beacons, we’re not just telling people that this is to do with the legacy of the Troubles and good relations, because Beacons are also safer and better for the environment.
So that’s something we can talk about without it being all about high level climate change and carbon. I think sometimes when you talk to people about climate change, it can be quite intimidating – even for myself!
We’ve been doing cooking and growing programmes and that’s having a great impact. People are growing more, they’re relying less on store bought goods, and then we’re able to have these conversations with them: “Where is this food coming from? What is the carbon footprint of the food that you’re buying? Is there a way we can help with a green space to facilitate some cooking and growing?”
We did a cooking and growing program with two Men’s Sheds and the feedback from that was absolutely fantastic – they had green beans and radishes and tomatoes! They were able to share it with their local community too, so there’s a real ripple effect. And the men now have a real interest in becoming carbon literate, because we’ve been talking to them about the carbon literacy training that some of the staff have been doing.
It’s great just having those open conversations and being able to say we can all be more climate aware without making it too complicated and too scary.
How is the current cost-of-living crisis affecting your work with communities?
It’s definitely having an impact. The price of petrol is having a big effect, and of course that feeds into the environmental thing, and those conversations are coming up a lot more than they would have previously. There’s a real interest in horticulture too, we’ve been receiving more calls and emails asking, “how do we grow our own food?”. Schools and community groups are interested in becoming more self-sufficient.
When we’re putting on training or events, we’ve noticed that people are saying, “you need to provide travel and you need to provide refreshments” – and maybe if those things aren’t provided, people won’t turn up. So that’s something that we’ve been building into funding applications and everything we’re doing.
When I work with the Men’s Sheds, they’re older men typically and a lot of them are widowers and live by themselves and maybe don’t know how to cook for one person or how to budget. So if we’re able to support them a little bit with travel, they come to an event and they have a good meal. Then through the cooking and growing courses we can show them how you can batch cook meals, using things like a slow cooker and saving a bit on energy bills, and how you could budget for a couple of weeks or a month. So rising cost-of-living is definitely something we’ve noticed and we’re adapting to.
What would you like to see change to enable more communities to take control of their futures?
Over here in Northern Ireland it would be having a working government and Executive that is listening to the needs of their community. Something we have noticed working in the communities during Covid and still now is that community staff and volunteer groups picked up a lot of the slack of the NHS and the public sector. So I would like to see more support and more money coming from funders and a working Executive that can put things in place that will have a positive knock-on effect on the cost-of-living, which is just shocking for people at the minute. I worry about how it’s going to affect people in the winter, especially older people.
The other thing is more sustainable funding. Short-term funding is great because you can run a project and get great feedback, but then that’s it. So maybe it’s a 12-week programme, you’ve built that relationship with the school or community group, and then it’s gone. As much as the staff want to keep in contact with the group, you just don’t have the time because you have to move onto your next project, and you have to make that viable for the organisation to keep going. So more sustainable funding is only going to improve our relationship with the community – and there’s so much scope for that to grow.
Find out more about Groundwork Northern Ireland’s work in communities