16 - Community research

Summary

‘I was probably apprehensive at the start. I think because we were new workers going into an area where there was a history of a kind of lack of engagement; a sense of a community that had been neglected and abandoned; that priorities had always lain elsewhere apart from that community. And then to come in with something that's a bit different, that's involved in using video cameras and getting people to really trust us and open up, I was kind of apprehensive “Is this going to work? Are we actually going to be able to build the relationships quickly enough that are going to allow people to trust us and kind of go through this process with us?” And so that was just a learning curve because I really didn't know how that was going to go.

‘I think typically and historically, if we were asked to go and consult on an issue around why poverty persists, it would have probably been a lot more traditional methods used, purely around questionnaires and focus groups, without maybe having that more robust kind of creative way of actually capturing what people are saying. So, I think we do have experience about that. But I think what came out of it just felt like this was something different, even to us who were community engagement workers, it just feels, it just feels meaningful.

It was a process, and it took months. We are just at the end of it now and it started in the summer, we’re talking six months. I think it was about giving yourself time, you know, and permission to take the time, to really explore it. Whereas before, you know, we might say right, we’ll have a one-off session or we’ll do a one-off consultation event about an issue or a theme and that would kind of be the stop and start of it, but this has just been a much more kind of flowing process where there's been different parts of that and it's been allowed to go back and sense-check and revisit and change how we were asking people things as we’re learning more as we go.