Preparing the ground - Community Profiling

At the very beginning of your project, you will probably have a plan to do a proﬁle of a particular community, a few interested people and some prelimin-ary ideas about issues that you want to examine. In order to take the proﬁle forward from the ideas stage to the practical work stage, there are a number of different tasks that will need to be accomplished. They are all important, since they will, in large part, set the tone for your future work, its scope and your style of working. The order in which these tasks are undertaken is less important than that they should all be accomplished.

Creating a steering group

Chapter 4 emphasizes the importance of involving a wide range of stake-holders in the community proﬁling process, therefore one of the very ﬁrst tasks that you need to undertake is to get additional people involved through

setting up a project steering group. How much work you have to do in order to develop a project steering group may depend on how the idea to do a community proﬁle came about. It may be the case that you already have a dedicated group of people who are committed to the idea. If not, then you will

Figure 3.1 Stages in the community pro ﬁling process 24 COMMUNITY PROFILING

have to create such a group of people who will direct and organize the early stages of the work until such time as decisions are taken about how the project is to be managed. The ideal size for a steering group will vary considerably between projects and will depend on the size of the community, the scope of the proﬁle to be undertaken and the time and dedication of those involved. It might be as small as two or three committed and energetic people or as large as 12 or 13. Whatever the number, the group must be small enough to work effectively but large enough that interested people are not excluded. Chapter 4 includes some additional ideas about involving stakeholders in this stage of the project.

There are a number of ways in which you might go about assembling a group of people to form a steering group. The aim is to recruit people who share a commitment to the idea but who come from a variety of different organizations (even if the project is led, by necessity, by one agency), or who represent different sections within the community, or who are likely to offer a range of different perspectives so that the project is not dominated from the outset by a particular viewpoint. One way to do this is to organize a public meeting in an appropriate venue which is widely publicized and indicate that all are welcome to come. A potential problem with this approach is that you have no idea at all who, if anyone, will turn up and whether they have any real understanding of what you are trying to achieve.

An alternative approach might be to write a letter setting out what you want to do and why and send it to as many groups and individuals as possible in the community in which you are interested, inviting them to come to a meeting. Examples of some of the groups and organizations you might wish to contact are listed in Figure 3.2 (overleaf). Of course, the kinds of groups who you get in touch with will vary according to whether you are profiling a geo-graphical community or a group of people sharing common characteristics. If you are doing the former, then you will want to invite representatives from the statutory services who work in that community; if you are doing the latter, you may wish to invite a person who has special responsibility for developing or providing services for that particular group. For example, if you are profiling women in your city, then you may want to invite local authority departments to send an of ficer who has special responsibility for services for women and any group or organization that campaigns on women’s issues.

In addition, you may want to invite representatives of groups who have resources of various kinds which you may wish to make use of, such as your local Council for Voluntary Services, which may be a useful starting point for building up contacts, or anyone with an interest in community development or social science research methods at your local university.

In general, you are more likely to get a positive response if you can send your invitation to a named individual rather than to the organization. If it has gone to the ’wrong’ person, then they are quite likely to pass it on to a more

PLANNING A COMMUNITY PROFILE 25

Figure 3.2 Examples of individuals, groups and organizations to invite to the initial steering group meeting

26 COMMUNITY PROFILING

appropriate person. When you write to these individuals, groups and organiza-tions, it is a good idea to include a tear-off slip asking people to indicate whether they will be attending and, if not, whether they would like to be kept informed of progress.

At the meeting, you will need to set out clearly what it is you are trying to do and why, and explain the purpose of the meeting. By the end of the meet-ing, you should aim to have achieved all the objectives listed in Figure 3.3.

This is more than enough to do at the first meeting! However, try to arrange the next meeting for a date fairly soon after, as you still have a lot of work to do before the steering group can really function effectively. At the next meeting, you may find yourself concentrating on the group itself and how it should work. There are a number of issues which need to be addressed, as shown in Figure 3.4. This may be a time-consuming discussion, but it is especially important if the steering group is also to be the project management group. If, however, the steering group intends to hand over to a different project man-agement group at a later date, then you may feel that some of these issues are best left until later. Having addressed these issues, the group is then in a position to move on to the more substantive issues of relevance to the profile.

Figure 3.3 Objectives of initial steering group meeting

Figure 3.4 Organization of the steering group

PLANNING A COMMUNITY PROFILE 27

There are six tasks that need to be accomplished quite quickly. These are:

initial planning, including preliminary identiﬁcation of the community and issues to be covered by the proﬁle; making contact with relevant community groups, leaders and key actors; learning from others’ experience; identifying available resources; engaging consultants or professional researchers; and the development of a management structure. We shall look in turn at what each of these entails. You might want to assign responsibility for the completion of these tasks to different members of the steering group, so that the burden of work is shared, and also to maintain commitment and enthusiasm on the part of group members.

Initial planning

At this point in the process, you will have an effectively functioning group with an idea or several ideas. The next task is to refine those ideas into some-thing workable. The first important decision that you have to make is what exactly is the community that is going to be profiled. If you are interested in a geographically located community, then it is useful to start off with a street map of the whole area. Begin by marking any ‘natural’ boundaries to the community such as parks, railway lines, motorways or major roads. This may identify some boundaries but is unlikely to identify all of them. There are at least three other relevant considerations which may help you define your community. The first is commonly held local views about where the com-munity or neighbourhood begins or ends. The second is whether there are any administrative boundaries that cut across your area. It is always easier to work with data that relates to the boundaries you are working with. The most obvi-ous administrative boundaries which you may want to draw in on your map are Output Areas, Polling Districts and statutory service administrative bound-aries such as health, housing and social services. In practice, these rarely coincide with each other, but it is important to at least know where they are.

The ﬁnal consideration is to deﬁne your community in such a way that it is manageable in terms of size.

If, on the other hand, your chosen community is a ‘community of inter-est’, for example women, an ethnic group or young people, you may still have to make decisions about boundaries. For example: are you going to include women from throughout the district or city or just one part of the city? What age groups are you going to include in the category ‘young people’? Exactly which ethnic group are you interested in? A further consideration is how you intend to identify your community. (There is further information on how to structure a sample in Appendix 2.)

A further task to be accomplished as part of this initial planning is to identify a preliminary list of issues that you want to examine as part of the community proﬁle. For example, is your proﬁle intended to be comprehensive, 28 COMMUNITY PROFILING

covering most issues that affect people such as health, housing, the environ-ment, employenviron-ment, welfare services, education, childcare, transport and so on? Or are you focusing on a more limited range of issues such as skills, train-ing and employment, or needs and resources in relation to welfare provision?

At this stage, you should regard this list of issues as provisional, pending consultations with a wider group.

Making contacts

Now you are in a position to begin to develop contacts within the community that you have identified and begin some initial consultation about the scope of the profile. You should already have begun to compile a list of key indi-viduals and organizations within your community and the steering group should now add to this. Having compiled as complete a list as possible, you then need to inform them about the project, seek their support and cooper-ation, and arrange to talk to as many people as possible. The first step in this process is likely to be the sending out of a letter giving details of the project, inviting comments and/or suggesting that the letter will be followed up within a week or so with a telephone call to arrange a meeting to discuss the project further. You may not have the resources or the time to see all these groups and individuals at this stage; if not, make sure that you have at least contacted the people whom you think are the most important community ‘gatekeepers’ (for example, representatives of ethnic minority community associations in areas where the ethnic minority population is significant) and a cross-section of others, for example some representatives of voluntary, community and statu-tory organizations, some elected community representatives and so on. lf you do have to prioritize who to see, then be aware of the politics of your com-munity. There may be groups or individuals who will take offence if they are not consulted at this early stage.

Rather than talking only to representatives or leaders of groups (who may not be truly representative), it might be a better idea to contact groups like mother and toddler groups, tenant associations and so on, and ask if you can have a half-hour ‘slot’ at some point during their next meeting to explain the project, and invite questions, comments, suggestions and offers of help. One of the aims of this series of meetings is to add to and amend your initial list of issues and to identify ‘resources’ (see the section on ‘Identifying resources’ on page 30).

Learning from others’ experience

A further task that can usefully be carried out at this stage is to ﬁnd out whether anyone else has tried to do something similar to what you are planning to do and whether there are any other major pieces of community

PLANNING A COMMUNITY PROFILE 29

development work planned for your area. If you have made contact with all the agencies and groups listed in Figure 3.2 you should have a good idea about this; however, you can also supplement this knowledge with an internet search. In addition, Councils for Voluntary Services often have copies of proﬁles relating to their area and Citizens Advice Bureau workers, health visitors and community nurses sometimes have to draw up a local proﬁle as part of their training. Talking to other people who have undertaken a similar exercise to your own before you start work can enable you to learn from their experience and, hopefully, avoid any mistakes which they may have made.

Identifying resources

Any community proﬁling exercise relies for its success on having a quite extensive range of resources. It is very important to have a clear understanding of three issues in relation to resources. What resources does the group already have or have access to? What resources does the group need but does not have at the moment? Which of these are vital for the successful completion of the project and how can they be obtained? You might want to draw up a grid along the lines indicated in Figure 3.5 (opposite) to help with this process.

Some external sources of assistance which you may want to consider using are staff from:

• your local university or college of further education, who may be able to offer help with survey design and data analysis;

• a community resource centre, who may be able to provide assistance with printing and photocopying;

• your local Planning Department, who may be willing to supply maps free of charge;

• your local library, who will help you track down documents relating to your community.

Engaging consultants or professional researchers

Depending on the ﬁnancial resources which you have available and the expertise that you have within your group, you may want to engage consult-ants or professional researchers to undertake all or part of the work for you.

Since this book is aimed principally at those intending to carry out most of the work themselves, we do not discuss this in detail. However, the Social Research Association (SRA) has produced good practice guidelines on commis-sioning social research (Social Research Association 2002) and your local Council for Voluntary Services may be able to help you ﬁnd an appropriate organization to assist you. However, it is worth saying that engaging profes-30 COMMUNITY PROFILING

sional researchers or consultants will itself entail considerable work. You will have to draw up a project speciﬁcation setting out what the project is about, what you require the consultants to do, any ideas you have about the methods to be used or the style of working you would prefer, the contractual arrange-ments and how they should ‘bid’ for the work if you are approaching more than one organization. Having appointed researchers you will then have to write a contract specifying in detail the work to be done, the timescale, the amount to be paid and when and how they are to report to you. In addition, you will have to work out a means of managing the consultants so that you have the amount of input into the work that you want, for example over the design of questionnaires or the wording of press releases. It can be very disap-pointing to spend a large amount of money on a piece of work carried out by professional researchers or consultants only to discover that they have not really done what you wanted them to do or they are not working in the way that you had expected. An alternative is to pay a professional researcher or consultant for, say, a day’s worth of advice on questionnaire design or data analysis.

Figure 3.5 Resources grid

PLANNING A COMMUNITY PROFILE 31

Developing a management structure

At some point during this initial ‘preparing-the-ground’ stage, you will have to make a decision about how the project should be managed. It may be appropri-ate for the steering group simply to continue as the project management group.

This is probably satisfactory if you are confident that the steering group con-tains a cross-section of representatives of the community and, more import-antly, has credibility with that community. Having the ‘right’ people on board at the beginning can increase ownership and the likelihood that the profile will be used. If this is not the case, however, you will probably need to create a new management group to take the project forward. If the management group is going to have credibility with the community, then its appointment will have to occur at a public meeting which all members of, and stakeholders in, the community are invited to attend. You might also want to use this meeting to formally launch the community profiling project with appropriate publicity.

The meeting should be advertised widely using all or some of the following methods: posters and/or leaflets displayed in the library, health centre, social services of fice, housing of fice, community centre, leisure centre, etc.; letters sent to community groups, voluntary organizations, community representatives and leaders inviting them to attend; press release sent to local newspapers; item included in ‘open space’ slot in local radio or television programme.

Having brought people together in this way, the steering group should explain to those attending what the project is about, what progress has been made to date and what the meeting is for. The main purpose of the meeting is to seek cooperation and support and elect, nominate or appoint a manage-ment committee. Whatever method you choose, you should bear in mind the fact that some people may be reluctant to put themselves forward, so you may need to encourage people to nominate others and possibly leave yourselves the option of co-opting people if you think that you have not got enough nominations or those that are being put forward are not drawn from a wide enough cross-section of the community.

In inviting nominations you need to make it clear what being a member of the management committee will entail in terms of the timing and frequency of meetings, other work that might be expected of them, and so on. In add-ition, you need to consider the kinds of things that act as barriers to people

In document Community Profiling (Page 35-45)