CCTS
Review 40 - December 2008

II: Community Resolve

Hen Wilkinson said she had set up Community Resolve in Bristol about seven years ago. Her daughter had been at the receiving end of racist bullying, which was very badly handled by almost everyone they encountered, from schools to doctors’ surgeries and different public bodies. She herself had trained as a community mediator, when the family was living in mid-Wales. Her aim was to train peer mediators in schools. She had to leave Wales for Bristol with her daughter (who is of mixed race) because the community where they were living was ‘very white’ and things were not going well. In Bristol she started doing some post-graduate study in conflict resolution and came across the idea of conflict transformation. This was in 1999, so relatively early in the development of the idea. The key people in the field that she was reading were John Paul Lederach and Johan Galtung.

In Wales her daughter had been bullied because she was black; in Bristol she was bullied because she was not black enough. Despite the city’s being the centre of Mediation UK, Bristol Mediation and other bodies, there was remarkably little understanding in schools and other environments about how to deal with racism and conflict.

Origins of Community Resolve

Community Resolve started out about eight years ago with £4,000 and one volunteer. Now they have nine members of staff and a turnover of around £300,000 and they work across the city in schools, local government departments, with the police and in universities. From the beginning it was an audacious plan but it seemed to have worked. The vision she and her colleagues had was of a geyser, which was throwing up good ideas and spraying them all over the city in different environments. They also thought of the organisation as a spider plant, with a core of people training up others from different communities who in turn would start their own projects.

The Bristol Gang Awareness project, as it was originally called, was set up long before the current concern about gangs, in direct response to violence between groups of young people. Community Resolve takes the principles of community mediation and applies them in a much bigger arena. Instead of dealing with a few people in a room, they might be working in whole tower blocks, whole streets or whole areas. It is a multi-layered approach. Many different practitioners are brought together for long-term peacebuilding programmes, rooted in a conflict transformation approach.

They stopped using the title of the Bristol Gang Awareness Project because the label was proving to be a liability – good for attracting funding, but an obstacle to putting across the idea that this was for everybody. Like ‘Truce 20-20', they were working with young people, usually in groups of ten, in areas of conflict, discussing with them how they got caught up in the conflict and the dynamics involved. One of the people they worked with is now employed by the project, another young person, aged 22, has just won a Leap award as Best New Community Mediator. The young people act as peer models, doing education work in schools, sometimes in conjunction with the police, and train alongside adults to become facilitators in large-scale projects. This year Community Resolve has finally got money for an inter-generational mediation project in which older and younger mediators will work together to help resolve problems between parents and teenagers.

They were careful to ensure that the people in the project came from all the local communities they worked with, including Sikhs, British born black, overseas born black, and people of different ages, genders and backgrounds. They acted as what John Paul Lederach calls ‘insider partials’: people who understand their communities in a way that outsiders cannot hope to. They know the networks and who is the parent of this or that young person, who is connected to whom in this or that way. Two of their workers in their thirties, one black, one a local imam, did not think that they knew each other, but then discovered they had been at primary school together. A Sikh woman who works with them was born and raised in Bristol and knows many local residents, not only in the Sikh community but in other communities also.

This local connectedness was, to her mind, the main reason for the success of the project. True, Hen herself had come in from outside with ideas, but if she had not succeeded in communicating these in a way that brought local people on board, the project would not exist. Next month she will be stepping down as day-to-day director of the organisation (although remaining as strategic director for now) and someone else who has been with the organisation for six years will take on her role. She had said at the start of the project that she would regard it as a serious failing if 10 years on she were still in charge of it.

Current Work

At the present time Community Resolve is doing a lot of work around youth and conflict – training, working with groups caught up in gangs, giving young people one to one support, whether they are in schools or young offenders institutions or somewhere in between. A short film about the organisation (Google ‘Community Channel-Community Resolve’ to find it) looks at one of these projects, the Sport and Nutrition Group, in which two young workers in their project meet with a group of ten to fourteen young people, most of them black, to work out in the weights room and to cook and eat a meal together. This is an undemanding project for the participants. They do not have to pay anything, there are no forms to fill in and it is an opportunity for them to come together and offload. However, the workers on the project are able to steer the conversation in certain directions, introduce ideas and do ‘a bit of signposting’. Interestingly, two of their younger members will be taking on that group, so it will be 19 to 22-year-olds working with the 14 to 16 year olds: currently the age group among whom there are big problems in Bristol.

Some projects work well. Others do not. Sometimes the funding is withdrawn, and Hen said that she would echo everything Hannah had said about funding being ‘so bizarrely territorial’, thereby reinforcing all the problems related to territory and postcodes.

Bristol has been experiencing major demographic changes taking place over a short space of time. New communities are moving into areas that have never previously had to deal with any sort of difference. There seems to be limited awareness of the problems this will give rise to, and few preparations in place to deal with them. Central Bristol is very diverse, but within a short distance there are unmixed areas where there is a lot of racism and the BNP are active.

As another example of Community Resolve’s work, Hen spoke about the residents in one street who came into conflict with a group of young people who had taken to playing football in a central square. They complained that the young people were noisy and abusive, damaging cars and refusing to move out of the way of people carrying shopping. This had been going on for a long time – the police were there two or three times a day, local councillors were involved, and the housing officers were being bombarded with complaints. But despite the range of people and agencies focusing on this issue, no progress was being made. There were even plans to put up a ‘mosquito’ device (which emits a piercing, high frequency noise only audible to younger people).

Community Resolve became involved at the request of a local community safety organisation called Safer Bristol. Its workers went to all the houses in the affected area and put a questionnaire through the doors asking the occupants whether they used the area, whether they thought there was a problem and if so how they would resolve it – asking them directly for their ideas. Young facilitators talked to the young people at the centre of the row, to hear their side of the story.

Remarkably, they got back 32 questionnaires out of the 36 distributed, and obtained a great deal of useful information. They then wrote out all the responses, though omitting the names of those who made them, and re-circulated them to all the houses. Then they invited people to a meeting, to talk about what was going on. The interesting fact to emerge was that although ostensibly the trouble was about the young people, the survey revealed that the major problems lay elsewhere. There were class issues and tensions arising out of the fact that some residents were house-owners while others were not, and that some owned cars while others had to rely on public transport. There was a definite element of racism in some of the remarks about the mainly black youngsters playing in the street and it also turned out that residents who did not speak English were being ostracized and picked on by their neighbours, as well as by other young people. That was the sub-text that nobody, including the agencies, wanted to engage with.

The upshot was that, following several successful meetings, a residents’ group was set up. People who had never previously communicated with each other began organizing things together on the street, and the young people became less of a problem. So it was a piece of work that provided an opportunity for people to meet and discuss and get to know each other.

Cultural Issues

Mediation approaches have to take account of cultural sensitivities. Hen cited the example of one tower block, whose occupants had been entirely white. Now around half of them were white, half Somali. Lots of little incidents had occurred, culminating in a big explosion in the park when two Somali women and two white women, a mother and her daughter, started fighting. All the onlookers then ‘piled in’. The police were there, along with many local agencies.

Community Resolve were asked to do some mediation, and went to a local Somali resource centre to ask how they would go about it. The tradition of mediation in Somalia is very different. The white woman and her daughter were prepared to meet the Somali women but the latter said they could only do so if their husbands were present. In addition, the Somali women expected to come into the room when everything had been made good – i.e. with no disagreement in the mediation itself – whereas with community mediation in this country people are taken through the process of displaying their upset and anger, getting issues on the table, and working through them. That model does not work in the context of the Somali community.

Other Challenges

Funding is a major challenge. This kind of work, especially couched in the language used by Community Resolve, is not very well known in the UK. The word ‘mediation’ is generally understood but it was more difficult to give a fuller account of the aims and methods of this work. Nevertheless they had done pretty well, receiving grants from people like Comic Relief and the Tudor Trust. They also raised money by selling their services to schools. The problem was that they were trying to work with bodies which have no money, such as schools and voluntary organisations. They received some funding from the Council, for example from the Community Development Fund, but were wary of getting too close to the Council and appearing to be ‘in their pocket’.

The government’s Prevent agenda has provided funding temporarily but Hen was highly critical of it. In some areas of the country, community organisations were refusing the money on the grounds that the scheme was divisive. Organisations like theirs have three possible options: they can follow the funding streams and bend the work to meet these; they can follow the funding streams but refuse to abide by the conditions; or they can refuse to follow funding streams altogether and risk having no money.

Joint ventures with other agencies worked best where Community Resolve had been allowed to take the lead through facilitating the steering group. Even then, things could go wrong; they could reach an agreement only to discover later that the agency had not implemented it. For example, one couple were being persecuted by local young people for eight years, with police and other agencies unable to stop the negative interaction. Community Resolve worked with all the people involved for several months, and an agreement was reached that Bristol City Parks Department would put a fence round the couple's house, so that the ‘eyeline’ was broken. However, it had taken the Parks Department nine months to erect the fence, by which time things were back where they started – or worse. Community Resolve is a small organisation which believes in responding quickly, but has to work in partnership with agencies with totally different cultures – the police, for example, and Bristol City Council – one of the slowest in the country. And yet not working with them would mean not embedding the process locally.

Managing their diverse staff team has complications too. They recruit locally and get some very good people, but they many, for instance, have left school at 15, worked on the street selling drugs for six years and then turned their life around. Now in their thirties, they have an excellent knowledge and understanding of the local scene but minimal experience of working in an office or using computer filing systems; still more importantly, after a lifetime of being marginalized they do not always feel entitled to speak out. Community Resolve works hard to empower people from different backgrounds and get them to go out and work in the community but, in this age of the tick-box culture, they also have to find a way of enabling them to work as part of a team and to manage the paperwork trail. The diverse team also brings diverse views, bringing relationship issues within the project that have to be addressed.

Hen said that her experiences with Community Resolve suggest that we in the UK have managed to create apathetic local populations. People often expect others to fix their problems. So if a group of householders are being pestered by noisy 15-year-olds, rather than getting together and standing up to the young people they are on their phones to five or six different agencies to get them to come and sort out the problem.

Hen is now teaching at Masters level about all this, dealing with MSc students and practitioners and getting those groups to think about the problems together. It was hard to measure the degree of success they had had, but she thought that the project had definitely had an impact on the city. It had changed practice in numerous Council departments and schools, and to some degree with the police. So despite the challenges and setbacks, it had been worthwhile.

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