Facilitating the so-called community work presents multiple challenges in the current urban context.
Daily life is challenging: living, moving, working, enjoying leisure time, eating, cultivating hobbies, growing old, growing up, commercial exchanges, offering assistance, advocating for social change, and promoting culture. The current era, moreover, is increasingly defined by a growing and unstoppable delegitimization of the ruling classes and democratic institutions, spanning local, national, and international levels.
In this context, engaging with the social fabric involves focusing on the various areas, entities, and realities coexisting within the urban environment, many of which are subject to progressive population ageing and growing loneliness.
Revitalising community and local welfare systems calls for collaborations between senior levels of public administration and city dwellers at the ground level.
Participating in communal life involves coordinated and integrated efforts in analysis and collaboration among associations, parishes, religious entities, political and social organisations, informal groups, and local networks across different sectors (both profit and non-profit), as well as communities of practice.
It is in these contexts that it becomes possible to identify and engage different local action-takers who are capable of transforming public administration and driving grassroots changes.
A third sector community facilitator aiming to engage a local community must consider three key points:
1) Encourage the spontaneous identification of problems and resources within each community.
2) Guide individuals and groups in distinguishing between what can be accomplished and what cannot.
3) Assist in selecting themes that encourage institutions and other public or private entities to take accountability, enabling them to transition towards a more cooperative and dialogic approach.
To achieve this, both the approach and methodology of work must also undergo change.
In a commercial relationship, the client places the order.
Social and political work, however, requires a different approach that goes beyond the logic of hierarchy and delegation to establish a collaborative framework based on the knowledge of territorial community’s needs and desires.
This is because social, economic, and cultural needs and aspirations are not simply expression of a vague and undefined city, but rather emerge from specific communities compose of those who live in a neighbourhood and are willing to take on civic roles, be it social or political.
In line with these considerations, the administrative framework needs to effectively respond to local needs, which require conducting integrated analyses of problems and resources, as well as fostering the ability to establish connections at all levels through a bottom-up approach that starts from the base.
A base that comprises those who live (and intend to continue residing) in a neighbourhood in every sense: among its houses, streets, squares, public spaces, and schools. These places are expressions of life and togetherness within diverse ethnic community groups
Understanding the base highlights the importance of public policies that govern these spaces – upholding the right to housing, resisting gentrification, challenging market dominance, and rejecting the perception of public places as mere transitional spaces, non-spaces.
We should recognise the vital role public places play for people living in small or overcrowded apartments, as well as for those seeking cultural enrichment and coexistence. These places offer spaces to meet, walk, read, eat, celebrate, play sports, enjoy cultural activities, and rediscover the pleasure of building relationships in neighbourhoods that feel more like villages and less like anonymous places.
The space and time of our lives encompass both our homes and communal areas. Therefore, we strive to create a welcoming, liveable environment everywhere – beyond merely ‘urban design’ – in ways that are culturally coherent and respectful of all stakeholders.
This requires creating genuine opportunities for people, groups, and local organisations to listen, engage, and support social groups and individuals through ongoing dialogue with collaborative institutions, moving beyond simplistic command-and-control or delegation dynamics.
This means that every project aimed at fostering communities and revitalising the city through its neighbourhoods must be cultivated intentionally and consistently. These initiatives require timelines, funding deadlines, financiers, partners, objectives, and coherent actions.
The process must begin with elements of shared analysis, long-term perspectives, strategic planning, the capacity and capability to manage conflicts, breath , patience, tenacity, long-term endurance, unpredictability, and the ability to learn through experience (both failures and successes!).
It involves overcoming those ineffective policies imposed from above (top-down) in favour of enhancing human potential and social creativity. This effort calls for collective participation from institutions, citizens, and local organisations that share the vision and dream, empowered by passion, commitment, and organisational skills that rise up to the challenge.
This work isworth the struggle, day after day, to see the vision of a better community take shape and move forwards.