Common Ground Programme

Common Ground has enabled twenty experienced practitioners from Northern Ireland and Scotland currently negotiating this challenging landscape, to connect, identify shared challenges, build alliances and engage in peer learning.  

Through online dialogue sessions, policy round tables and project visits we have built a strong, motivated group of like-minded practitioners and leaders.   

Through our dialogue we have identified a shared experience that our language and elements of community development practice have been adopted and appropriated by public sector bodies, governments and practitioners and leaders in other sectors. We have witnessed elements of community development practice being undertaken without adequate time or resource or the application of the values and principles of equity, self-determination, trust and solidarity that underpin effective and skilled community development practice.  

Where this happens, on a practical level these processes fail to provide adequately informed insight for the improvement processes, they seek to support or problems they seek to address. But in addition, they run the risk of leading to further damage and harm for the individuals and communities involved and erode rather than build trust.  

Our Visit to GalGael

A key element of the programme has been the opportunity to participate in community-led activities and visit community development projects in Belfast and Glasgow

But for all the participants the single most powerful and transformative element of the exchange was the visit to Galgael. We were incredibly grateful for the time given to sharing GalGael’s story with us, connecting with the GalGael community and having the opportunity to participate in activities and the sharing of food and companionship.  

The visit to GalGael enabled participants in the Common Ground programme to reconnect with what is so central to community development practice.  Equitable and shared learning, experiences and human connections.  

For us GalGael represents authentic, community-led practice, resilience, creativity and a reminder of what meaningful community development looks like when it’s rooted in local needs.  

This is what stood out for us about our visit to GalGael and its impact on us as community workers:

• Reconnecting with purpose and passion for community development

• Authenticity and being grounded in real community need

• Challenging risk-averse culture and fostering positive risk taking

• Solidarity, not charity

• The importance of human connection

• Lasting emotional impact, a catalyst for personal and organisational change

• Reigniting a sense of agency, courage, challenge and activism

Community development can and should be transformational.  But not just for the individuals and communities we seek to work alongside in solidarity.  When it works well community development practice can be equally transformational, personally and professionally, for us as practitioners. 

Our visit to GalGael has been a timely and reinvigorating reminder of that truth and an opportunity to remember why we became community workers in the first place.  Giving us a renewed sense of mission and clarity on the importance of community-led approaches in what feels for many of us the most challenging social, economic and political times we have lived and work through.

We returned home re-energised and committed to embedding the learning from GalGael in our practice, organisations, projects and wider approaches to community work in our own communities.  

Thank you.

Reflections from visiting community development practitioners:

• It was a great reset for me…getting back in touch with that side of community development.  
• It took me back to why I do what I do…if you keep the energy, you can make the change.
• There was something about GalGael that was…so rooted in the needs and the people of the community.
• Solidarity, not charity.  I just loved what they did.
• It reminded me that the simplest things work best – human connection should be at the heart of everything.
• It’s got me thinking about how we challenge the systems we’re too agreeable to.
• I’m going to try and be more GalGael in my everyday life.

 Background

Common Ground is a project bringing together community development practitioners from Northern Ireland and Scotland, supported by the Connect Fund in Northern Ireland.  The project is led and co-ordinated by the Community Development and Health Network (NI) and Community Health Exchange (Scotland).

This project was born from the joint recognition through dialogue between CDHN and CHEX that whilst the policy landscape in both Northern Ireland and Scotland, on the surface, appears to be supportive of these approaches, this is not reflected in the everyday experiences of our network members and the communities experiencing the harsh realities of the impacts of poverty and health inequalities.    

And crucially there is less time or resource for practitioners to take time to reflect, learn, take stock and connect with each other on a human level.  

If you would like to find out more about the Common Ground programme, or CHEX or CDHN please contact:

CHEX:  [email protected] or [email protected]    

CDHN: [email protected] or [email protected]