Produced by James Ashdown on behalf of the

Barnardo’s CANDL Project

Introduction

This workbook has two purposes, firstly to enable your church/organisation to understand its community better and secondly to equip you with some of the skills that are useful for this activity. The workbook follows three tracks:

  • The first track takes the form of an example of a community profile conducted by a small urban church.
  • The second track makes clear the underlying principles and techniques demonstrated in the first track, giving practical help in using the techniques illustrated.
  • The third track provides guidelines for you to undertake your own community profile and reflect upon that process.

Our approach is not problem-oriented. It is one stage back from that. It seeks to address the needs of those new to their communities or relatively uninvolved in them. Thus it seeks to provide a way of opening you up to your community, therefore it values and affirms action but doesn’t see community action as the only benefit of a community profile. Above all the community profile should change you, helping you to see in different ways and changing your relationship with your community.

In this workbook we touch on the disciplines of social research and engage in some of the debates relating to how social research should be done and what kind of data it produces. Whilst we are taking an essentially practical approach we can not ignore some of the more theoretical issues - for instance:

  • Is the data we produce true?
  • Are we undertaking something with scientific validity?
  • Is our exploration of our community of any benefit to that community or an exploitation of it?

Our approach tends to assume that absolute truth about our community is a mirage. Everyone has their own perspective and each perspective has its own validity. In large part our aim is to encourage the development of a shared perspective which incorporates many people’s perspective. Whether this is a true perspective or not is arguable but what is crucial is that it should enable us to interact creatively with our community - truly being Christians who listen to our neighbours and can therefore communicate with them. We of course seek to come to true conclusions and would not want to invent facts but we are aware of our fallibility as fallen creatures and seek humility in our understanding. In the final analysis if we are enabled to love better and wiser then we have succeeded in our task. This approach frees us from an unhealthy worship of professional techniques - we will respect and use them when they give us practical wisdom but reject them when they claim to obtain definitive truth and/or exploit the people who are the object of their attentions. We will also reject them when they require unrealistic resources of time, people or expertise. We hope that you will have enough confidence to have the same attitude to this workbook - you are the person doing the work, you must find a way of doing it which works for you!

Track one: Profiling the Anytown Estate

Beginnings

  1. Graham Clifford had recently moved to London. In Bristol he had been the member of a lively inner city church who had undertaken a church audit. Although the church was an inner city parish it had many active and able members who had been able to do a very professional job of the audit which was much admired. Graham had been involved in the audit and learned a lot from it, therefore, when he moved to London he wanted to repeat the process.
  2. He had moved to London because he had got a part-time job with a Christian charity, they had helped him find lodgings with a Christian family in an up and coming street in south London. A few streets away was a large council estate which was served by a parish church and a Baptist church. Graham found the parish church and bit too high for him so he started going to the Baptist church. The Baptist church had about 60 members mostly drawn from the local area but, as usual, the burden of the work was carried by the four deacons. The minister had been at the church for 6 years but was unwell with ME so was able to do only the bare minimum. Still it was a friendly church with about half the congregation coming from the estate and Graham quickly felt at home. After a while Graham suggested that the church do a church audit. The church was happy to have a young, enthusiastic new member so agreed, even though they didn’t quite understand what Graham wanted to do or why! As Graham only worked 4 days a week he had more time to spare than others so he undertook to develop a team and undertake the audit.
  1. Graham began by taking a good long walk around the estate. In fact he undertook a number of walks. Early in the morning he saw people going off to work and was surprised at the number of well-dressed people walking off towards the train station. He wondered what jobs they did. In the late morning the estate seemed empty, except for a group of men in suits with clipboards who appeared to be inspecting the estate. Who were they? Between 3 and 4 the estate became alive again with children and their mothers. Graham realized this was because the schools closed then. He thought that it would be interesting to talk to the head teacher at the school - but how could he arrange an interview - why would the head teacher be interested in speaking to him? One evening a friend from Bristol was down for the weekend so Graham decided to do a tour of the pubs on the estate. He was a little worried about what he’d find but was surprised to find the pubs nearly empty - what, he, wondered did people do with their leisure time?
  2. This was all Graham managed to do for a while. He tried to establish a group to do the audit with him. A few people showed some interest but when he called a meeting no one turned up. He felt very dispirited and let things drop for a few months. Then he met a nun who was attached to the Anglican parish. She had to do a community profile of the estate for a course she was doing. Graham was elated. He gave up on the idea of doing a church and community audit and decided to concentrate on doing a profile of the community with the nun - Sister Mary. The first task they decided upon was to look at the census figures.
  3. Graham remembered that in his old church a teacher had produced a wonderfully interesting collection of statistics based on the census figures. He had got all the figures from the library and produced lots of very impressive maps and charts. On his free day Graham went to his local library. They didn’t seem to know anything about the census. Eventually the head librarian turned up and said that census figures were available on the council web site. Fortunately Graham had access to the Internet and using a search engine found the council web site without problems. Once in the web site it took him a little time to find the right page but once he had it was very revealing. He was provided with ward profiles which divided the borough into 20 or 30 areas and gave figures for each of them, drawing up an individual profile for each ward. When he looked at the map of awards he found that two separate wards covered the area of the estate but the estate was only a minority of each ward. Graham was disappointed at this but found the information about the racial composition, age, housing and unemployment fascinating. He began thinking about the whole borough and comparing the census figures with what people said about different areas. He remembered one person saying that there were now more black people in the borough than white but the census figures showed that in fact only one in four people were black! Often, however, his impression of an area was confirmed by what he read in the census. The areas people seemed to regard as the best places to live had lower unemployment, less overcrowding and more car ownership. Some things shocked him such as the high rate of unemployment amongst black men - especially young ones and the high rate of mobility amongst Africans. When he thought about this he wondered if this had a connection with the many African people who drifted in and out of the church without ever seeming to get involved. After digesting all this information Graham felt dissatisfied, however, because it didn’t tell him very much about the estate. One of the wards which included the estate had a lot of unemployment, a high percentage of black people and a majority of council housing whilst the other had extremely low unemployment and a high percentage of professional people with cars living in private property. He guessed that the estate was more like the first ward but how could he be sure? He remembered that the information produced by the teacher in his old church seemed to cover a much smaller area than the ward and in certain respects was more precise. He remembered, for instance, that the teacher had produced graphs of the age profiles in 5 year intervals. This information only included certain irregular intervals (0-5, 6-15, 16, 17, 18-20, 21-35, 36-pensionable age, over pensionable age) which didn’t seem as useful. He decided to see if he could find more detailed information on the net and ask again at the library.
  4. At the library the librarians weren’t very helpful and said that all the information they had was on the Web site but agreed to see if they could find anything else. After waiting for half an hour a librarian emerged with a wad of paper. This turned out to be the census figures from the previous census! Graham was disappointed but photocopied the material relevant to his two wards (the photocopier in the library cost 20p a sheet!) and went home. At home he found it interesting to compare the two sets of figures. To his surprise he found that the first ward seemed to have increasing unemployment and under 5s whilst the second ward had falling unemployment and an increasing number of professionals and 20 and 30 year olds. Both wards had an increase in car ownership but the rate of increase in the second ward was much less. Graham began to realize that the area was more complex than he realised, that it was changing but not equally. Nonetheless despite finding this interesting it wasn’t providing him with the information he was seeking and he was starting to get frustrated.
  5. Then Sister Mary came to his rescue. She had found out that the diocese had produced figures for every parish from the census figures. The parish was not completely the same area as the estate but it was a much closer fit than the wards. This at last provided Graham with what he wanted. It confirmed his hunch that the estate was more similar to the first ward than the second. It differed mainly in that it had particularly high levels of under 5s and of Africans.
  6. Graham took this material and bought some large display boards on which he displayed the material in what he hoped would be an interesting fashion. He was very excited when he was asked to talk about them in church one Sunday. He explained that the levels of unemployment and low car ownership indicated that the estate was one of the poorest areas in the borough and that it had high levels of Africans and under fives. After the service some people came to look at his boards but he was rather disappointed in the few people who seemed interested. He was particularly shocked when an African man, one of the few Africans who had really got involved in the church, who scolded him for saying that African people produced a lot of children. Graham said that all he was pointing out was that there were a lot of under fives in the estate and a lot of Africans - not that the two were connected. The man took his point but said that he ought to be more careful because some people would cause trouble if he kept going on about these things. Graham was rather taken-a-back by this but it did make him realize that facts could have different impacts on different people. A few weeks later this struck home forcibly and painfully. It happened at the church meeting during Any Other Business. One of the older people who lived on the estate said that Graham’s boards should be taken down as they said that the estate was a poor one, but he had lived on the estate for 30 years and no one ever called him poor. He continued by saying that this estate was a good one and that all the trouble on it was caused by kids from the neighbouring estate. A discussion followed. Some people said that the estate had gone down hill and that the new people who moved on were rough (behind him Graham heard two people say that it was all these black single parents who didn’t look after their children). In the end it was agreed that the references to poverty and poor people should be removed. Afterwards Graham was in shock but a few people came up to him and said that he had done a good job and that it was only a few people who complained and that they were old-fashioned. Certainly Graham learnt that facts were not quite what he thought they were.
  7. A little while after this Sister Mary called Graham to say that a diocesan officer had told Herbert was a government web site which provided figures on the whole country. Graham looked at the web site and found it very interesting -- he could even look under census figures for the small village where his parents lived! Eventually he found out that the census material was divided into units called output areas these were areas of a few hundred households and enabled him to be much more precise in looking at the estate, even though it did take up quite a lot of time to get the information he wanted. He therefore decided to concentrate on getting information on under fives and Africans on the estate. This provided the interesting information that the Africans were concentrated in the area around Graham’s Baptist church. About this time there was a public consultation about a proposed SRB[1] bid for the estate. At this meeting Graham met the local beat policeman through whom he was able to get some crime figures for the area, these he didn’t find very useful because he had nothing to compare them with. More helpful was a representative from the Health Authority who was able to show Graham research on hospital admissions from the estate and some particular work that had been done on asthma which was causing concern on the estate. These tended to confirm Graham’s impressions about the estate but by now he was beginning to feel that statistics were of limited value, he wanted to find out what these facts and figures meant in reality. How did people feel about the estate? What were the issues that concerned them? What caused the council to want to bring money from the SRB into the estate?
  1. At the SRB meeting Graham had met a number of people who seemed to know what was going on on the estate. He made a list of these people:
  • Local policeman
  • Housing officer
  • Head teacher of primary school
  • Health visitor
  • Local councillor
  1. He decided to try and visit these 5 people. He found the policeman difficult to contact and kept being passed round various police stations but eventually bumped into him in the street and had the chance for a chat. Subsequently he passed on to Graham some local crime figures. The housing officer agreed to see him but was very defensive and would say very little about the estate claiming that ‘we have no real problems - just a few troublemakers’. Graham tried repeatedly to get in touch with the head teacher but his calls were never returned. When he contacted the health visitor he found she had moved on and the new one seemed to know even less about the area than him. She was very grateful for the information that Graham could give her! Graham felt he wasn’t getting very far until he spoke to the local councillor. They met in the local pub and had a fascinating discussion for three hours. The councillor was newly elected for the opposition party after a by-election and although he lived on the other side of the borough seemed to know a lot about what was going on.