2 - Community Networks and Policy Dimensions

Summary

I refuse the prison of ‘I’ and choose the open spaces of ‘We’.

Toni Morrison, Mouth Full of Blood, 2019

Community brings many benefits to us as individuals and for society. This chapter looks at how community networks support collective arrangements that enable people to live and work together. It will also explore the negative aspects of community networks that can lead to stress, exclusion and corruption. Networks enable us to meet personal and social challenges, seize opportunities and deal with some of the problems facing communities in this increasingly global, yet fractured, world. Over the years, governments of all persuasions have sought to harness the power and knowledge to be found in communities, and the chapter considers how policy making has incorporated these functions to the advantage of both state and society.

Survival and resilience

Low-income communities, struggling with hardship and uncertainty, are often praised for their resilience, despite what Dobson (2018) calls ‘frenetic neglect’. But resilience doesn't necessarily challenge social injustices; for those affected, it tends to be associated with communities ‘getting by’ and ‘just about managing’ (Hickman et al, 2014). The Joseph Rowntree Foundation's (JRF) ‘liveable lives’ research revealed the patterns and traditions of often mundane, subtle and unnoticed ‘everyday help and support’ in three neighbourhoods of Glasgow (Anderson et al, 2015). There were a number of components to this arrangement, not least the levels of trust and solidarity. Residents felt that the city's reputation for friendliness gave them a ‘licence’ to act in kind and generous ways, maintaining a ‘moral economy’ (Anderson et al, 2015, p 41) of mutual sociability involving favours, swaps and helping hands that enabled people to ‘stick together’ while valuing both privacy and reciprocity. The authors argue for a ‘social mindfulness’ of informal helping and greater awareness that networks may need constant maintenance and occasional repair, especially in places where there are low cohesion and poor public amenities (Anderson et al, 2015, p 56). At the individual level of what Brownlie (2014) calls ordinary relationships (as opposed to professional ones), people seem to benefit and find solace from the advice and support of others simply ‘being there’ in times of trouble, the kind of ‘emotional labour’ often undertaken by women that helps people to cope with trauma and get on with their lives (Guy et al, 2008; Hochschild, 2012).