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!

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Track one: Profiling the Anytown EstateBeginnings1. 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.

Facts and figures1. 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

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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

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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 SRB1 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?

Flesh on the bones1. 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

2. 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. He explained how the estate was being used by the council to dump refugee families as it was an unpopular estate with increasing problems of damp and infestation (by cockroaches and pharaoh ants). This was causing a lot of problems because the tenants association was racist. In fact it wasn’t really a tenants association at all but only a few unrepresentative older residents who hated any kind of change. He had a vision of creating an alliance of all the oppressed people on the estate - refugees, youth,

1 The SRB (Single Regeneration Budget) is a fund of money that the Government makes available for inner city regeneration. It is bid for on a competitive basis mainly by local authorities.

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women etc. that could truly speak for it. Graham was very excited by this and felt that the church could play a role in it.

3. When he was speaking to Sister Mary, however, she was very dismissive of the councillor. She said he didn’t know anything about the estate and that his ideas were entirely unrealistic. She pointed out to Graham that all the people he had spoken to were white, professionals, gently pointing out that none of them lived on the estate and had a very limited perspective. She began to introduce Graham to some of the people she knew. First there was the childminders association. This was made up of local women who seemed to be involved in most of the things that were happening - a jumble sale, a children’s party for Christmas and a playscheme for the summer. Secondly there was a small youth club meeting in an old tin hall. The youth leader here was black and most of the members of the club were also black. The youth leader was dismissive of anything that was going on on the estate, saying that the youth were totally disillusioned. Thirdly there was a group involved with Neighbourhood Watch. These were particularly angry about the tenants association whom said were completely useless but they were also equally angry about the councillor. Graham found it interesting talking to all these people but also felt out of place. Nearly everyone he spoke to was a woman - the whole culture of the estate seemed to be female. What were the men up to? The youth club was male but black which he found, frankly, intimidating. Sister Mary had said that the only way to understand the estate was to get involved. But how could he get involved? He thought about getting involved in local politics but everyone on the estate seemed so scathing of the local politicians that he didn’t really like the idea of that. He also wondered what the church thought it was doing, it seemed totally out of touch with everything that was going on. There were obviously huge problems on the estate. The youth were alienated, funding cut backs were making it difficult for residents organisations, the fabric of the estate was deteriorating, people were aware of a refugee problem but nothing was being done and there was a complete lack of unity amongst people. When Graham reflected on this he had some sympathy with the councillor but felt unhappy that he seemed so out of touch with the local residents - he had never met him at any of the community meetings which he had attended. Nevertheless his interpretation of the situation seemed to Graham the most satisfying. Sister Mary knew a lot of people but completely avoided making any judgments or seeking to make anything happen - being more than content to relate to people on an individual basis without asking why they were in the situation they were.

4. Graham was involved in this scenario for about a year, especially through his involvement as secretary of a group who planned a local community festival, and almost forgot about the community profile until his minister asked him about it. He decided that he ought to sit down and write something. He listed all the people who he had met. Beside each one he wrote what that person was most interested in, what was their biggest problem and what would help solve that problem. He also listed significant events which had happened or he had heard about like the drugs raid on the youth club, the fire which had burnt out one floor of some flats and the article in the local paper about refugees on the estate. Finally he drew up a list of the most significant issues on the estate. These were:

Damp in some blocks Bad design of estate re crime etc. Refugees Alienation of black youth Lack of facilities for mums Poor health especially of children5. When Sister Mary saw this list she commented that Graham had only put in bad things

about the estate therefore they added positive aspects of estate: Variety of people Grant to refurbish youth club Friendliness of most people Plans for new health centre6. When Graham finally looked at the few pieces of paper he had produced they didn’t seem

like very much but he realised that he had learnt much more himself. Though he still felt like something of an outsider he had learnt to be more cautious in the way he described people and certainly understood that there are many different sides to every story. His minister was certainly glad with what Graham had written and said that he wished he had

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had something like this when he first started as minister. He also mentioned in passing that most of the new people joining the church seemed to be refugees. In all the attention he had given to the community Graham suddenly realised that he had been missing something important that was right under his nose.

Taking shape1. Graham began to reflect on the work he had been doing on the estate. He remembered

how the issue of refugees had come up repeatedly, yet it wasn’t developed because no one seemed to know any refugees. At the time he was preparing for a Christmas carol service that was being done by the young people in the church. As he read the Christmas story it suddenly struck him that Jesus was himself a refugee in Egypt! After two years of interest in the estate things began to make sense - God had been preparing him to address the issue of refugees. He began to make friends with some of the African people who came to the church. To his amazement he found that 6 of them were refugees, one of whom was the daughter of an ex-cabinet minister. One young man, a former school teacher, became a particular friend. Graham began to research the issue of refugees in his area. He discovered a number of small refugee organisations in his area and got linked up with some people from the larger refugee agencies. At this point Graham’s life began to change he started working as a volunteer with a refugee advice organisation and after a year got a job with a refugee charity through whom he trained as a social worker. This rather limited his involvement in the life of the church.

2. Things at the church, however, were moving on. A new minister came who picked up the issue of refugees, including it in Sunday services and organising a seminar on refugees for local churches. At one point the church contemplated offering sanctuary to one of the refugees connected with the church although it came to nothing in the end. Graham did however notice an increasing involvement of refugees and other Africans in the life of the church. Two were elected as deacons and became very involved in running the church. His friend remained more marginal to the church and struggled with depression as he was able to get nothing better than cleaning jobs and felt isolated from his family back home. Gradually a spirit developed in the church which identified refugees as their issue. Graham often found himself wondering how much this had to do with his work or whether it would have happened anyway, with the increasing involvement of African refugees in the church.

1. About four years after Graham came to the church. The women in the church, particularly those from a refugee background, began talking about the problems their friends, family and acquaintances were having bringing up children. They started to talk about setting up a nursery in the church. When Graham heard about this he was able to direct them towards Sister Mary and her network of contacts with childminders and other women’s groups. Through this they received the help of a community worker in setting up a nursery and women’s group which at last began to address some of the concerns of refugees on the estate. At the launch of the nursery Graham really enjoyed himself. Many of the people he had got to know over the years were there. He no longer felt so out of place. He chatted with the black youth worker who no longer seemed so intimidating and angry, he joked and laughed with the childminders and the councillor gave a short, down-to-earth and encouraging address. Graham was still aware that the problems on the estate had not gone away - in fact had probably got worse. The tenants association and Neighbourhood Watch were still arguing with each other, the damp problems had got worse and the proposed Health Centre had come to nothing. But he felt he was among friends and could ask for nothing more, even the attack on him in the church meeting seemed like a distant memory - yet he still remembered it when he was in danger of being patronizing and, in a way, felt it was the best thing to have come out of all his work.

Moving on

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Track Two: Doing Community Profiles

BEGINNINGS 10A little bit of theory 10

Traditional research 10Leftist and postmodern critiques 10Action research and participatory methods 10Taking a stance 10

Orientation 11Observe and listen 11Who is your consistency? 11

Getting it Together 12Working with people 12Analyzing your resources 12A checklist 12

THE SKELETONFigures

Census figuresOther figures

ResearchDocumentary researchHistorical researchObservations and photographsQuestionnaires and surveys

PresentationMappingChartingPresenting figures

Reports

FLESH ON THE BONESMaking contactsQuestions, questions!Interviewing

The structured interviewThe semi-structured interviewThe focused interview

Participant observationGroup work

Focus groups.Workshops

Collating and reportingData gatheredAnalysisPresentation

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DISCERNING THE SPIRITPeople first

Your constituencyYour subjects

Focusing in 28Principalities and powersPractical ideas

Reflecting on the dataDrawing Bible parallelsPraying the contextSetting a goal

GETTING MOVINGThe uses of community profile documentsSteps towards projectsFurther researchPersonal developmentChanging the ethos

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Beginnings

A little bit of theoryIt would be perfectly possible to avoid this section but it seems valuable to me to explain a little about the theoretical basis for my approach. Personally, I believe, that a good theoretical basis greatly aids your practice on the ground.

Traditional researchTraditional research has seen reality as a single, knowable unity. This is accessed by the scientific process which by following what is supposed to be a reasonably reliable method provides us with dependable information about reality. These methods must be closely adhered to in order to produce real knowledge, any deviation from the prescribed methods renders the results of questionable value. There has been a tendency to prefer these methods to be essentially numerical i.e. providing figures. These are called quantitative methods. Qualitative methods are also used i.e. those which don’t produce figures. These are meant to be undertaken nonetheless within a scientific framework i.e. producing generalizable results, being value-free and following a predetermined process. Tim May’s book Social Research gives a good introduction to research methods and is widely available.

Leftist and postmodern critiquesThe traditional approach has been widely criticized, even by those who still largely adhere to its values and methods. Radical critics, especially those on the left and feminists have particularly criticized its value-free stance. They argue that research is dominated by the establishment values of white, middle-class males and this prejudices traditional research. Postmodern critics criticize, rather, its assumption of a single, knowable reality. They argue that people construct their own realities and that one is not more valid than another. The pursuit of a safe, ‘scientific’ method actually cuts you off from much valuable data because your method cannot be entirely sensitive to your context. In the quest for scientific reliability you don’t hear what people are really trying to say. This is the position which I hold although I also have sympathy for the radical critiques of the value-free approach. I also have a tendency to believe that not all constructions of reality are equally valid - I give greater credibility to the constructions of the oppressed than those of the oppressor. Not that the attitudes of the oppressors are uninteresting, or that it is always easy to decide who is the oppressor and who is the oppressed. For a discussion of these issues see Guba’s The Paradigm Dialog the approach underlying this workbook is described in Erlandson’s Doing Naturalistic Research.

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Action research and participatory methodsAnother new approach to research has been developed by those who are more interested in results than theoretical issues. Not that the two are really possible to disentangle but the distinction has some use in this case. These people have typically been professionals who are looking for a better way to undertake their professional duties. They are not seeking some disinterested or exotic truth but results that will enable them to do their job better - this is often referred to as Action Research. The approach has been particularly evident in the field of Management. Participatory methods, on the other hand, have been developed by community workers and overseas development workers. They have sought to involve the subjects of the research in doing the research themselves. There has therefore often been a strong undercurrent of liberation in participatory research. Both of these approaches have a marked similarity with what I am attempting here. Action Research is well described by Ernest Stringer in Action Research - a handbook for practitioners. Also worth exploring is the work of Peter Reason and Nici Nelson & Susan Wright in Power and Participatory Development.

Taking a stanceIt is not necessary to adopt a fully realized theoretical position in order to proceed with our process. Nonetheless any thinking person is likely to come up against some of the issues which we have outlined above in the process of doing a community profile. This is illustrated in the story of Graham and his efforts to understand his community. It is worthwhile considering what you are wanting to achieve. Are you undertaking a piece of Action Research which will enable you to do your work as Pastor or community worker better? Are you seeking to undertake participatory methods which will empower the community? Are you needing to produce a strictly quantitative piece which will impress a certain funder? Or are you just interested in the different perspectives the people in your complicated and diverse community have? Whatever your approach you will benefit from knowing what it is - even if it is only to justify yourself to doubters and scoffers!

Orientation

Observe and listenGraham’s first action was to walk around his area. It is generally a good idea to orientate yourself by some such process of passively looking and listening. This will help you become accustomed both to your area and the kind of listening which you will need to develop. A few simple guidelines might be useful:

Walk around at different times of the day. Notice the differences Does architecture or geography give you a sense of the different areas in your patch? What kind of people do you see? Keep an eye open for anything indicating people who are active in the community e.g.

tenants or community associations, voluntary projects or local authority initiatives. Where to people gather? What are the focal points of the community?

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Who is your constituency?Who are you doing your work for and who are you going to do it with? Graham failed to pay sufficient attention to this dimension. He was really doing it for himself but tried to co-opt his church into the process, nonetheless he did manage to find an ally in Sister Mary who provided him with an entry point into the community. It is not, necessarily, a bad thing to do a profile simply for your own interest but you should be clear that this is why you are doing it. If you are doing it for others you have to take seriously what they want to get out of it and tailor your work appropriately. You should also work out how you are going to keep them in touch with what you are doing. This workbook focuses on the community for profiles looking at the church see John Finney’s The Well Church book.

Getting it Together

Working with people If you can develop a team with which to work this is obviously an advantage but it has two dangers or problems. Firstly you may find that people lack any real vision, themselves, for the process and are only jumping on your wagon. Secondly you may find people have a different vision from you - this may be as much of a benefit as a hindrance, however, as it will introduce you to the different perspectives people have. People worth having on a team might include:

People with good contacts in your community People with relationship-building skills A mix of ages, sexes, classes and races People with influence with your constituency who would be able to turn your work into

action People with specific skills e.g. computer expertise or community development People who have the time and energy to do the ‘leg-work’

Time spent developing relationships with your team will be time will spent. In particular you need to develop a shared vision - not one which is imposed but something genuinely incorporating the different participants interests.

This workbook is oriented towards the church. You may decide you would like to work in partnership with a wider group, particularly if you have a discreet problem in mind. Paul Burton’s Community Profiling - a guide to identifying local needs is a good guide in this case. It focuses particularly on the issue of getting a group together.

Analyzing your resourcesBefore commencing the profile it is helpful to analyze your resources. Graham identified that he had a free day each week in which to undertake the work. He had the motivation to do it and some limited experience about what it involved. Yet he didn’t make full use of the resources he did have - why didn’t he ask the people at his previous church more about how they undertook the process? This analyzing of resources will help you develop a realistic understanding of how much you will be able to do. In particular we should at this point define the area we are seeking to profile. We need to have sufficient resources to do the job and it should be congruent with what our constituency expects.

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A checklist Who is the community profile being done for? What is the area we are profiling? Who is going to be doing the profile? What are these people able to contribute? What expertise do you lack? What is your timescale? What are your sources of support and help?

The SkeletonThe first task is to create some outline of our community using existing data. This I call a skeleton. This doesn’t tell us many important things such as what people feel and experience about their community but it is helpful in a number of ways.

It gives some initial clues about key issues. It helps us define more exactly the area we are profiling It helps us start to ask questions about our area It provides the kind of information which is useful when dealing with institutions and funders It provides a check to more fanciful or prejudiced interpretations

FiguresA skeleton is built on certain sets of figures which are available in the community but not necessarily all that readily. The process of acquiring them requires a certain amount of diligence and knowledge and, also, a degree of wisdom in deciding what information is worth having and what is not worth the effort.

It is difficult to think of a circumstance when the official census is not going to provide the basis of your data, for it provides the basis for virtually all other social statistics and figures.

Census figuresGraham eventually became aware of pretty much the full extent of census data available. The Internet has become the chief source for getting census information. The government web site www.neighbourhood.statistics.gov.uk is crucial in this regard and the neighbourhood statistics part can quickly provide a profile of any ward in the country. Other material is also available and help pages should be up to guide you through. Below a guide to the census is provided.

The most modern census figures date from 2001 when the ten year visit to every household in Britain was made. They form the basis of all the statistics in the country. Its depth and thoroughness is unrivalled. It cannot be used to identify individuals. Many people, especially non-poll tax payers, didn't believe this however. This means that is likely certain groups are under-represented eg young adults, ethnic groups & the homeless. Nonetheless the data is always very useful. The raw data is processed by the government and made available on the Web. Councils normally publish material which can be obtained from libraries or their web site. Other organisations, such as London Diocese, also utilise the data to publish their own material. Universities are also a good potential source if you have access to them. It is generally possible to make use of secondary data derived from the census, although it may not tell you what you want. Computerisation and particularly the Internet has made it easier and quicker to get at the data - so long as you have access to adequate computer hardware!

What information is available from the census?2001 census

Accommodation type Age, All people in 13

(people), communal establishments,

Amenities, Approximated social grade (i.e. class),

Cars or vans,

Communal establishment residents,

Communal establishments,

Country of birth,

Dependent children, Economic activity, Ethnic group, General health, Hours worked, Household

composition Household type, Households by

selected household characteristics,

Housing stock,

Industry, Knowledge of welsh, Limiting long-term illness,

Living arrangements, i.e. married couples etc

Lowest floor level, Marital status,

Multiple ethnic groups,

National statistics socio-economic classification i.e. class ,

Ns-sec of household reference person i.e. class of head of household,

Number of people living in households,

Number of rooms,

Occupancy rating, i.e. overcrowding etc

Occupation, People aged 18-64 in single adult households,

Persons per room, (household residents)

Persons per room, (households)

Provision of unpaid care,

Qualifications, Religion, Residents in households by class of head of household

Schoolchildren and students in full time education living away from home during term-time,

Sex, Tenure (households), i.e. owner occupied, local authority rented etc

Tenure (people), Tenure of pensioners,

Time since last worked,

Total population, Welsh language skills,

Full information on all these categories is available at the web site

1991 censusAbout people

1) Absent residents 2) Age 3) Car ownership4) Country of Birth 5) Dependants 6) Economic Activity7) Ethnic group 8) Head of Household 9) Household: nature of10) Housing 11) Lifestage 12) Marital Status

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13) Moved in last year 14) Occupation* 15) Sick: permanent & long term

16) Qualifications* 17) Students 18) Travel to Work*19) Unemployment 20) Visitors

About housing

1) Amenities 2) Communal Establishments

3) Medical & Care Establishments

4) Non-permanant accomadation

5) Non-self contained accomadation

6) Occupancy Type

7) Persons per room 8) Second homes 9) Student accomadation10) Tenure 11) Vacancy

Information on the 1981 census is also available. This covers the same areas except that it has no data on ethnic group. An estimate of numbers from ethnic minorities was gained by using figures derived from numbers living in households headed by someone born in the New Commonwealth and Pakistan. Data from 1981 and 1991 is not always produced in the same formats, however, which can be frustrating.

How is the information available?Level

1) Output areas (clusters of a few hundred dwellings) previously called enumeration districts

2) Parishes (when the diocese has calculated these)

3) Wards 4) Postcodes5) Boroughs/Counties 6) Regions7) National

Not all information is available for every level. Details marked with a * are 10% samples only available at ward & above. As is, for instance, country of birth.

Maps are available of the areas.

Where is the information available?Internet access is now pretty much indispensable as a way of accessing census data. The www.neighbourhood.statistics.gov.uk site mentioned previously is the best place to start. Councils also do useful work on census material and seem to produce more complex material which isn't easily available otherwise. Universities and diocese may also do useful work which is worth accessing. Material from previous censuses may be available from libraries and council planning departments -- watch out the boundary changes when using this material, however. Nonetheless getting a picture of how the area is changing can be indispensable. Some information, such as religion, was only gathered in the 2001 census.

Towards the end of the decade the census data will get out of date. Communities, however, don’t change that rapidly and census data always provides a useful benchmark. Other figures and your own researches will help you discern how the community is changing. Governments also make predictions which can be useful.

The census material should not be treated as a god, however. Although it is treated by many as absolute truth there is no reason why it can’t be questioned. A conversation I had with a

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enumerator for the census in Bayswater revealed to me how lacking in scientific reliability the census was - in the rapidly changing population of Bayswater mansion blocks it was difficult to be sure who you were enumerating.

Other figuresThere are a mass of other official statistics which it is theoretically possible to access. What you might be able to get hold of will largely depend on luck and persistence. Here are a few areas worth examining:

Police figures on crime. These are notoriously unreliable, however. Education figures on schools. These might provide figures such as free school meals,

population predictions and children speaking other languages. Housing figures. These can provide details of who council properties are being let to. This

can be a good guide to how an area is changing. Housing Associations might also provide these figures. Some details might also be available from estate agents, building societies or housing advice agencies.

Health Authorities. Public health departments undertake extensive research and might be able to supply data on mortality rates, hospital admissions and the prevalence of various diseases. Some GPs also provide useful annual reports and may anyway have some relevant data.

Training and Enterprise Councils may have details of local labour markets Council figures are also available on various aspects of economic activity and

unemployment.

These figures all tend to lack the small scale of census figures. It is also difficult to give guidance on how to get hold of them. It will almost certainly depend on the kind of relationships you manage to make with the people who control these figures. It is also worth looking around the central reference library for your district. Various reports are gathered here which may or may not prove useful. I have found useful reports on crime on the underground, economic activity and mother tongue languages for instance. This moves us on to other areas of research, less explicitly concerned with figures.

Research

Documentary researchIt is always worth trying to get hold of anything anyone has written about your community. The library is a good place to start, of course. Any community organisations working in your patch will produce annual reports, and perhaps, more usefully, profiles of the area to support funding applications. Local churches are also quite likely to have done some kind of audit or profile.

Historical researchThere has generally been some kind of historical research done into your area. Much of this is frustrating for our purposes as it often concerns the architectural development of the area rather than the people who lived there. Other forms of local history tend to be along the lines of ‘King Alfred’s son is thought to have killed a stag here in 901’ which might be vaguely interesting but hardly useful. An offshoot of a community profile might be a local history project which seeks to record some of the oral history contained within your community. You might, also, find that a local historian has already done some work of this kind. Your local history library is always worth consulting, this might have a name like Local Studies Centre.

Observations and photographsA project to photograph your area will be worthwhile as it has the benefit of providing some useful material for presenting the results of your work. EUTP have produced a guide to housing types which helps you look critically at your community. Various observation exercises can also be interesting such as counting political posters during election time or observing the people frequenting a public space over the course of a day, these could be reproduced in a numerical form if so desired or recorded using video. Of more lasting value

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would be to develop a curiosity which is always looking out for how things are changing in your community.

Questionnaires and surveysThis method is the one which people most normally think of when seeking to do a community profile. There is therefore plenty of material available for those thinking of doing a questionnaire. It is something, however, that is time and resource consuming. It might be appropriate in some of the following situations:

You have a ready supply of people willing to undertake the leg-work and desk-work involved

You need the credibility which a quantifiable survey will provide You have a specific, unresearched issue which you want to explore You have some money to pay people to do it for you!

If you decide you want to undertake a survey I would direct you to the work of Greg Smith who has produced some practical guides.

PresentationThis dimension of community profiling is generally under valued. But it is the thing which will have the most immediate impact. The good presentation of a limited and superficial piece of work is likely to have more impact than a scrappy, dense and unattractive presentation of even the most brilliant research.

MappingGenerally the best way to present data is through a mapping process. The area should be agreed and then a large-scale map obtained. Getting this map is not always easy. Amenable planning departments can provide suitable ones. Libraries generally have something suitable which can be studied and copied. The map can then be used to plot the data you gather about the area. Care should be taken in deciding what data is to be plotted, simply cramming on as much information as you can is counter productive for the whole point of the map is to make complex information easily accessible. Information should be chosen for plotting because it says something meaningful.

Standard categories used in plotting include:

Type of housing: marked in different colours Condition of housing Age of residents Ethnicity of residents Economic status of residents Indicators of wealth and poverty

Geographical information can also be usefully added:

Roads: major and minor in different colours Other transport features e.g.railways Buildings e.g. churches, schools, shops Open spaces e.g. parks

Your own observations such as the disrepair of buildings or places where people gather are also crucial. Photographs are an excellent supplement to observation.

This will provide you with the resources to produce a visual display.

ChartingOnce the map has been created it is worth looking at creating some tables and graphs. These enable you to look at data in more detail and to provide comparisons with other areas. A number of graphs are worth considering* :

* Examples are taken from work I did in west London17

A bar chart of ages in 5 yr. blocks. This is often the single most revealing information about an area as it quickly identifies many of its crucial characteristics.

0

100

200

300

400

500

0-45-9

10-1415-19

20-2425-29

30-3435-39

40-4445-49

50-5455-59

60-6465-69

70-7475-79

80-8485-89

90+

Age SpreadAge Spread

A pie chart of ethnic groups. It is often useful to do two, one comparing the dominant group (usually white) with other large groups (e.g. Black and Asian), then a second comparing the relative size of the ethnic minorities.

Other (13.78%)

Black (26.66%)White (59.56%)

EthnicityEthnicityCaribbean (651 )

African (161 )

Irish born (339 )

Other (146 )

Asian (other) (73 )Chinese (20 )

Bangladeshi (164 )

Pakistani (31 )Indian (58 ) Black (other) (140 )

Minority Ethnic GroupsMinority Ethnic Groups

Perhaps mainly Moroccan

A bar chart comparing poverty and social indicators with national and/or regional figures. These indicators vary depending on academic fashion but useful ones include: car ownership, overcrowding, rates of migration, central heating, lone parents and pensioners living alone. A separate graph comparing housing tenure may also be useful.

1%

10%

100%

No central heatingNo car

1 parent h'hold

1 pensioner aloneOver crowded

Disabling illness

UnemployedMoved in last year

PARISH

LONDON

Social Indicatorsin comparision with London

This chart uses a logarithmic scale which shows more clearly which indicators in the parish are above the London average.

Presenting figuresNumerical information is best collated in tables. It is helpful to try and group enumeration districts, for example, into similar blocks. Comparative data (i.e. for the region or nationally)

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should also be given in order to enable people to make more sense of all the figures. Select the most interesting figures rather than overwhelm people with masses of statistics.

Areas TOTAL% Total Borough London

A B C

Housing Tenure

Owner Occupied 32% 26% 33% 29% 473 38% 57%

Privately rented 11% 5% 25% 11% 177 30% 12%

Housing Association

15% 5% 32% 14% 233 10% 5%

Council 41% 62% 8% 43% 698 23% 23%

Over crowded 9% 8% 13% 10% 153 8% 4%

Moved in last year 11% 21% 24% 17% 616 22% 11%

Ethnic Groups

White 53% 60% 73% 60% 2127 73% 72%

Caribbean 29% 12% 6% 18% 651 6% 4%

Bangladeshi 1% 10% 1% 5% 164 3% 1%

A somewhat more ambitious approach can be to produce maps which illustrate aspects of your area. I do this by scanning an enumeration district map into the computer.

ReportsPerhaps most important of all is a brief summary of what you have discovered. Ideally this should be one page. This should give a flavour of the area, the most significant statistics and a few key points. It will help you prepare for the next phase of the process.

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Making contactsIf this is our aim then clearly our first job must be to make contact with appropriate people. Who we manage to contact, how we establish a relationship with them and the quality of that relationship will determine the effectiveness of our endeavour.

Graham made an initial list of people worth talking to. These, however, only had a limited perspective because they were essentially professional outsiders. Through Sister Mary he was able to gain contact with people who were residents of the estate and thus gain a more rounded picture. He also started to make relationships with people which began to take precedent over his work on a community profile. To some extent he became lost in his community. This may or may not happen to you but it is certainly true that you will need to become involved with people if you are to put any flesh on the bones of your understanding. If you try to maintain the role of detached outsider you will not be trusted and will be likely to do more harm than good!

So how to go about making contacts? Graham used the church to facilitate this. This gave him a discernible identity in the community and gave him an immediate link to the person who proved to be his key contact - Sister Mary. Yet it took him a while to link up with the people who were most accessible to him - his church, because they had previously appeared to be unhelpful. The point is start with what you’ve got. Many people tend to consider the church and community as entirely separate, in fact, the church is almost always part of the community. Various other points about making contacts can be made:

Your first contacts may not necessarily be the most helpful You will enter a world with existing patterns of rivalry and cooperation. Be aware of who

you are siding with and what the implications of this might be. Try and ensure a balance of men and women, racial backgrounds, ages, residents and

professionals. Be aware of the impression you make on people. You might be blessed with the ability to

establish an immediate rapport with anyone you meet. More likely you will have to learn how to establish relationships with different sorts of people.

Consider the impact of your clothing and language on different people Admit your ignorance when talking with people It is generally best to wait to contact someone until you have been introduced by someone

they know and/or trust. Your first contact with a person should inform them about yourself and what you’re doing

and you should try to avoid taking any particular stance. Identify as best you can the most influential figures in the community and tell them what

your doing. You might have a vicar or tenants leader who assumes he is the voice of the community. This might seem arrogant to you but you could find yourself being isolated if you don’t acknowledge them.

Establish a clear sense of what your role is. Work out a simple way of explaining to people what you are doing.

Avoid promising too much as the result of your profile. Try and understand the groups and organisations you work with. This means both formal

understanding e.g. the roles of vicar, curate and churchwarden and the informal e.g. the secretary of the tenants association who has the real authority rather than the ‘figurehead’ chairman.

Questions, questions!We will go on to examine the process of talking with people about their community. But before that it is helpful to have some idea of the kind of questions that you want answering.

Flesh on the BonesMany community profiles or audits have stopped after completing the skeleton. I believe that this is only the starting point. For anyone involved in people-work it is only when the perceptions, lives and struggles of people are listened to and appreciated that effective work can begin. This is the purpose of putting the flesh on the bones of our skeleton. We are seeking to understand how people understand, make sense of and interpret their lives and community. In more technical language we are seeking to understand the various constructions of reality by which people create meaning.

It is generally not possible to clearly distinguish the process of constructing a skeleton and putting flesh on the bones. You will have to make contact with people in order to gather information. This can be a help as it often provides an easier way in to meeting people. Nonetheless I have found that distinguishing the two processes is helpful.

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This will help make you more purposeful and will provide a framework for understanding. These list of questions from UTU are a helpful example:

What do people do together? - institutions, clubs, associations etc. Who is respected, feared, considered significant - and why? How do people get along with each other? Within groups? Between groups? How is the place seen by the residents? How is the place seen by people from outside - planners, estate agents, social workers,

police, teachers, clergy? How do you see it? How do the residents see other places and outsiders? What myths about the area are there? What do people complain about? What are people proud of, or pleased about? When recently have people acted together to achieve something Which people have acted? For change, or to preserve the status quo? Is anyone trying to identify the needs and potential in the community? Who is determining the shape of the community? Who are the people making decisions? What groups or people or parties or departments impose their will on the community? What changes have you seen in your area? Who made them? Who opposed them? Are there conflicts of lifestyle in the community? What assumptions and values are indicated by the way groups of people live?

These, of course, are not the questions you would necessarily ask people - certainly not the whole lot! They rather create a framework in which you can think, search and reflect. Below I go on to examine some techniques that might be useful to you.

InterviewingThese give the opportunity to explore peoples attitudes in depth. The skill involved in being an interviewer should not be underestimated, however, it is easy to ask leading questions which obscure peoples real attitudes. It is also difficult, at times, to probe beyond conventional responses. A balance needs to be achieved between probing questioning which helps everyone concerned to reflect more profoundly on reality and a journalistic invasion of peoples feelings. It is not a bad idea to check out with individuals interviewed what you are reporting they said before publishing anything. This helps give people ownership of the whole process - creating an expression of what a group of people genuinely think, rather than just one person’s opinions.

It is worth examining social science books on the subject of interviewing. Drawing on May’s book Social Research we can identify a number of different sorts of interview:

The structured interviewThis is similar to the times when you are accosted by researchers on the streets. They have a limited set of questions which they ask you, this gives them an easily analyzable set of results in the minimum of time. In effect the structured interview provides quantitative rather than qualitative data.

The semi-structured interviewThis is probably the most common and natural form of interview. The interviewer follows a set of questions but allows and/or encourages the interviewee to elaborate on answers. As we have mentioned before such interviewing is in fact a skilled process so there should be a healthy waryness when interpreting the results of interviewing by untrained interviewers.

The focused interviewThis method can, perhaps, be likened to the skills developed by a pastor in counselling. There are no set questions but the interviewer has a clear idea of the range of issues s/he is trying to address, yet by having no set questions s/he is intent on genuinely listening to the

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experience of the interviewee. You may well find yourself getting into informal interviews which are similar to the focused interview. If you have a list of questions and concerns in your head then you will be in a position to make better use of these opportunities.

Interviews need to be recorded in some way. Tape recorders can be useful but many will find them intimidating. We are generally, therefore, thrown back on to taking notes. In certain circumstances even the taking of notes is inappropriate e.g. in a social gathering. This is the reason why ethnographers have a reputation for weak bladders. They are always popping out to the lu as a pretext for jotting down a few quick notes! This begins to move us into the realm of participant observation. One of the major problems with interviewing is the amount of time that it can take, the rigorous transcription of tapes, for instance, is generally beyond anyone but academic researchers or book writers. James Spradley’s book The Ethnographic Interview gives a very thorough description of the skills and techniques of interviewing.

Participant observationThis classic method of ethnography is obviously highly relevant in gaining information. In essence the method requires involvement in peoples day-to-day activities whilst recording what is observed and experienced. Again, ethical considerations must be paramount and an exploitative spying should be avoided at all costs. It can also be engaged in at various levels of intensity:

Anthropological fieldwork. At this level participant observation is the backbone of the academic discipline of anthropology. This requires a careful recording of observations and a detailed attempt to interpret these observations. In contemporary anthropology there is an increasing insistence upon ‘reflexivity’ in which the anthropologist considers his/her feelings, his/her biases and his/her influence upon the events observed. This level of intensity is not normally possible but reading anthropologists work and reflections on the method of participant observation can be very helpful e.g. James Spradley’s Participant Observation.

Active involvement. This is the approach that Graham entered into. The doing of work is more important than any research and impressions are only written up at a much later date - normally in response to some immediate need!

Active participant observation. In this approach you are seeking to enter a community. The emphasis is on research and finding out but an effort is made to work with people and engage with their felt experience. A regular record of observations is made and time is taken out to analyze and interpret these. This remains an outsider perspective - which will mean certain benefits and problems, but it does seek to gain a real feel for the insider perspective. It may lead you into active involvement.

Reflexive involvement. In this case you are already involved but you decide to take a step back from the situation and reflect on it. This might require you decreasing your active involvement e.g. stopping being chair of a group but remaining as a member. This would provide you with the time to record and analyze your observations. This is very much an insider perspective.

Recording information is always important. A way worth considering is using filing cards. Each observation is recorded on a different card. These cards are dated and titled. It is important to put only one observation on each card. You can also use cards (maybe of a different colour) to record reflections and to make notes to yourself about your method. Thus you might have a series of observation cards written during the AGM of a nursery which focus around the issue of the funding of the nursery. After the meeting you might write a reflection card about how concerned people are about funding issues even though there doesn’t appear to actually be a problem. Does this indicate an underlying insecurity about funding and money? A method card might also be penned reminding yourself to check out with the treasurer the actual financial situation. The advantage of separate cards is that they can be easily sorted by the titles. You might, for instance, at a later date sort out all the cards which speak about finance. These might give weight to your initial perception about a fundamental insecurity about finance and funding.

Group workThis is an excellent method of gathering peoples attitudes and perceptions. The richness of corporate reflection can provide real and practical insights into the context. It also involves people in the process, helping things progress towards action. The skeleton, already

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prepared, can be used to stimulate peoples reflections about their area - again challenging this skeleton should be encouraged rather than frowned upon.

Group work can be helpfully polarised between two approaches:

Focus groups.These are group discussions / interviews around a particular subject. They are heavily used in marketing where the technique has been developed to an extent you would probably not find helpful (see David Morgan. Focus Groups as Qualitative Research). Nonetheless the writing on focus groups has some useful insights.

Distinguishing between the role of facilitator and observer. You will not get the most out of a group situation if you have to lead it and observe it at the same time. Therefore a team approach to focus groups is useful if possible.

Don’t concentrate only on the words people use. Body language and other indicators can be just as important - even the way people arrange their chairs. They all have messages.

Self-managed groups. It is always a good idea to discuss with the group what they want their ground rules to be. This might make groups more manageable and help you concentrate on observing if you are alone.

Technicalities. It is worth making sure how effective your tape recorder is and that you have a supply of batteries etc. if you are going to record interviews. You could even use a camcorder.

Size of groups. 12 is probably a good maximum and 6 a minimum for effective interchange.

The amount of stimulation and leadership. Some focus groups work with only an initial subject being introduced and then letting the discussion develop as it wants. This is a kind of contrived participant observation. At the other pole the facilitator leads the group through a carefully constructed set of questions.

WorkshopsThe workshop approach has been popular amongst church groups. A pioneer of this approach was the Evangelical Urban Training Project. Their material remains amongst the most useful available, especially for urban churches. Their Learning without Books is also a good guide to the general approach. The purpose of the workshop approach is to use and build on the existing knowledge of the participants. It seeks to steer a course between a didactic lecture and an unguided focus group. It therefore requires leadership which is both well prepared and sensitive to where the group is coming from and what they come up with during the workshop.

Below a workshop based on census material is outlined.

Aim: to enable the group to think about their area, come to a good working knowledge of its nature and collect their insights into it.

5 minutes Welcome

20 minutes

Creating a shared map of the area.

Prepare a large outline of the area with a few distinguishing features e.g. roads, river or railway lines. Then get the group to fill in the following other features:

Other important roads Geographical features e.g. parks, hills Main buildings e.g. churches, pubs, community centers, shops, industries Where people in the group live Any particular areas e.g. estates or elderly housing etc.

Use the knowledge of the group to find out:

Where people gather What the reputation of various areas is What used to be different about the area etc.

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Mark what people say on the map to create a record.

15 minutes

Prepare a set of questions about the area based on the census material2e.g. Introduce this by talking about finding out more about the people in the area.

1. How many people live in this area?2. How many of these people are under 5?3. How many of these people are Asian?etc.

These will have to be based on your own researches. It is a good idea to use your choice of questions to highlight areas and issues of importance. You can give people multiple choice answers if you like.

Once this has been completed then tell people what the census answers are. Have a discussion about this. Why might the census material be wrong? E.g. its out of date, certain sorts of people wouldn’t fill in the questionnaire (we know for instance that 20-30 year old men are underenumerated).

A short 5 minute talk about some of the key issues that have emerged for you in doing the community profile could be added at this point.

15 minutes

Split the group into smaller groups and get them to list on flip chart sheets 10 things about the area which give them joy. Repeat this with things which bring sorrow.

15 minutes

Bring the groups back together and compare what they have recorded. Notice what common themes emerge and if there are any disagreements. Use this to initiate a discussion about the area - is it a good place to live, what would improve it ...

From this the key themes of a workshop emerge:

Making use of people’s existing knowledge Adding knowledge to this existing knowledge Enabling people to reflect on what they know, what others know and what you input Varying methods of working. Using visual methods as well as straight talk. Splitting larger group into small groups. This encourages shyer people to participate and

can help spark discussion. The need for flexibility in order to respond to what happens during the workshop. Recording what is said as a natural part of the process of the workshop.

Collating and reportingThe analyzing and presenting of qualitative data is a somewhat different process from the one seen with quantitative data in the skeleton section. It suits itself to an ongoing process of analysis, in fact, this is often necessary. As you talk to one person or group and reflect about it questions arise that are asked to the next person you talk to, thus a continuous process of reflecting, adapting and deciding on priorities is happening. Erlandson (see bibliography) talks about this and roots it in the fact that the human brain is the most sophisticated means of analysis that we have. As it receives information it processes it, makes connections and uses this as the basis of judgments. This is to be encouraged. Nonetheless a certain sitting back and reflecting on data once gathered often reveals insights missed when submerged in the process.

Data gatheredIt is definitely worth planning how data is going to be gathered before engaging in the process of putting flesh on the bones. I envisage the process being a fairly freewheeling exercise which mixes the building of relationships and active involvement with research; so it is easy to lose sight of the research dimension. It is therefore important to get into the habit of making records. A notebook to record immediate impressions, a journal written up when back home and the collecting of flip-chart sheets from workshop sessions are all useful.

2 Any other material you possess about the area could also be used e.g. results of a door-to-door survey.

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The data you will be left with will vary. Some may be left with a vast quantity of data dutifully transferred onto computer, others may just have a few scraps of paper which basically operate as spurs to their memory. Both have their advantages. The few scraps of paper will be easy to get to grips with and provide some basic issues and themes. The computerized data will have a richer variety that will be more likely to produce new insights once analyzed.

AnalysisThe basic point of analysis is to provide something that is useful for you. Various techniques can be used; some are suggested below.

Recurring themes. Try to find issues which keep coming up. Graham used this technique to provide his list of issues.

Patterns. This is a development of the previous. It means looking at where various issues were raised. Do the professionals working on an estate raise the issue of poverty, whilst the residents concentrate on crime? What is this telling us? One is not necessary right and one wrong rather the contradiction is revealing in itself.

Comparison. This is the technique used in the workshop above. Compare the picture official data creates of an area with that produced by residents. Other kinds of comparison might be useful.

Discernment. This is a more reflective process. Having become familiar with the data let it percolate through your mind. Offer it up to God. What significant themes begin to develop? What things seem to link together?

Discussion. If more than one person can have access to your basic data then the interaction of reflection could be very useful.

PresentationThe presentation of qualitative data is less straightforward than that of quantitative data - there being no charts to produce or tables to draw up. Nonetheless two approaches can be useful.

Keep it simpleA long rambling discourse on the community is unlikely to be interesting to many people. It is better to discern some key insights which will stimulate thinking and action. Thus a helpful report could consist of nothing more than three-five key points with a few sentences of explanation and indication of needs to be addressed and a useful contact.

Be imaginativeIf you want to do something more involved the best approach is to use your imagination. Think about how the key issues you have discerned could be presented in an interesting way. Maybe a drama or service looking at one of them. People have used video to illustrate the problems of, say, damp on an estate. Perhaps a local school could be involved with making an exhibition for the local library.

Suggestions are only of limited value for this will depend very much on your own situation, resources and contacts. If nothing strikes you as being fun and possible to do you’ll probably be better off keeping it simple.

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People firstIn discerning the Spirit it is important to remember that we are dealing with people. Facts and figures or our intriguing insights into community dynamics are all very well but things really come down to the people we have met, and hopefully, got to know. It is helpful to see them in two ways.

Your constituencyAs we saw previously Graham failed to take his constituency - the church - seriously enough. He had a divide within his head between the church and the community and decided that the church wasn’t really interested in the community. In discerning the Spirit we are seeking to find what will initiate some action - what will get our skeleton and flesh moving. It is only people who are going to make this happen, for people are the instruments through which the Spirit works. Thus the Spirit will most effectively work through what people are already interested in. For this reason we need to understand and appreciate the people within our constituency. Elderly people might be the most pressing need you have discovered in your community but if you’re consistency is people who are really interested in doing something for children, maybe the needs of elderly people should be left on the back burner.

Your subjectsPerhaps one of the worse mistakes we can make is see the subjects of our profile as simply that - subjects, to whom things need to be done. If you have built good relationships you will have some idea of what kind of things people have energy for doing themselves. This will be crucial in the process of discerning the Spirit. God is always going ahead of us and is active in people’s lives long before we began to get involved. Hopefully you will become part of what God was already doing, the best way to ensure this is to listen to what people are interested in doing for themselves. Often this will require listening carefully to those who are rarely heard because they are drowned out by the loud voices which are always complaining that nothing ever happens and never will.

Focusing inUp until now the basic process we have been engaging in has been one of opening up. We have sought to expand our horizons, to look at new things and seek new possibilities. Now we must begin to focus down. To choose what is important. This might not necessarily be the most important thing but what is important for us. This is what makes things happen for me and my community. This is where I see God operating.

As indicated previously this stage is not necessarily something that only happens at the end. Even before we start our own inclinations, skills and experience will push us in certain directions. But being aware of the process of focusing in on what is important to me is doubly beneficial. Firstly it can help us move from confusion to clarity. It helps us deal with the mass of information that a community profile can produce and so create a tangible sense of where we should be going. Secondly it makes us aware of the subjectivity of the process of community profiling. We are not engaged in some kind of objective fact-finding but a living process of discerning where God is calling us.

The spiritual dimension to discerning the Spirit is important. A number of biblical passages are interesting to reflect upon.

Acts 17:16-33 Paul in AthensPaul is a man who is aware of what’s going on around him. He is in Athens waiting for Silas and Timothy but he can’t help noticing what is happening all about him. He feels the idols in

Discerning the SpiritYou’ve done all the hard work. You’ve put all the facts and figures together, got involved with your community and even managed to write a short report. So where now? This will depend on what you have been discerning during your work. It is difficult to separate the stage of discerning the Spirit from the other stages because it emerges from that work. You will begin to get a feel for things as you do your work. Graham required someone else’s comment to crystalize his thinking. He saw what God had been leading him towards. This had big personal implications for him as well as for the church. Thus discerning the Spirit is the most overtly spiritual task in a community profile and probably the most rewarding.

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the city. In particular he notices the altar to an Unknown God. This gives him a key to understanding the Spirit of Athens, or at least how the Spirit is moving him, Paul, to act. He focuses on the Athenians anxious hunger for God which caused them to seek after many gods - even those they didn’t know! This proved the basic text for his address to the Athenians. It helped him do what he was called to do.

Numbers 13 Spying in the Promised LandThe spys were profiling Canaan. They formulated their simple report:

Aspect Description

The land Rich and fertile (samples of produce supplied)

People Powerful

Cities Very large and well fortified

History Descendants of giants live there

Ethnic groups Amalekites, Hittites, Jebusites, Amorites and Canaanites

But they disagreed about what the Spirit was saying to them. The majority thought that the land was too well defended to be conquered. Caleb thought differently and urged immediate attack. In response the majority began to formulate an adapted report. They played down the positives of it being a fertile land and played up the strength of the inhabitants and especially the myth of them being descendants of giants.

Thus we see the so-called facts are not so important as the discernment of what the facts meant. The presentation of the facts was influenced by what they were thought to mean. This illustrates the interconnection between doing a profile and discerning what it means.

Principalities and powersI have put the emphasis on discerning the Spirit as a personal process through which the individual or group discerns what God is saying to them. Others believe that we can discern a more profound underlying reality about the spirit of a place - that is the principalities and powers governing that locality. This is something that might happen to you within the process of a community profile. Some overriding sense of the place will perhaps strike you. This might be particularly related to some aspect of its history, geography or some particular incident which you experienced. Maybe in the context of praying for your community this will be reinforced in your mind. To help in the process of discernment three checks can be undertaken

The reality check. Does my perception really accord with everything that I have observed and experienced. Maybe it is just a striking occurrence which is unsupported by any other data. Does the fact that it was used as a burial ground during the Black Death necessarily have an impact now? One person you interviewed may have made a strong impact on you, but maybe it was just the force of her personality rather than any real insight.

The people check. In discerning the Spirit people are all important. Does our perception really arise out of what people feel and experience or is it an abstraction from numbers, documents or our imagination? If our analysis of a community is rooted in relationships with its people then it will help our actions be people-friendly rather than paternalistic do-goodings. It is also more likely to lead somewhere constructive.

The fruit check. Discerning the Spirit is about seeing what will make our data live and become active. Is our discernment productive or just an abstraction which leads to no real engagement with people’s lives and, therefore, no real work for the Kingdom? This perhaps is the best check on all our work - ‘by their fruits you shall know them’. Not that I would want to reduce everything to a simple reliance upon the end result. For Graham it was hard to discern whether his work had produced the fruit of work with refugees but it had been fruitful - certainly for him and it was part of a process within the church. The Spirit blows where it will. The largest fruit is not necessarily the tastiest.

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Practical ideasEveryone will have their own way of discerning the Spirit. Below I outline a few suggestions which might prove useful.

Reflecting on the dataA key process will be getting immersed in the data which you have gathered. Various techniques can be used.

Fiddling with figures and counting wordsI have found a computer useful in playing with statistics. The point is to try and find new patterns in the data you have collected. Ideas might be suggested by things people have said to you. If someone says “Their don’t seem to be many professional people on the estate” then that might make you go back to your figures to compare the numbers of professional people on your estate with other areas. Also just looking at figures on a spreadsheet, sorting them in different ways or making new charts might provoke new thoughts. One community I worked in seemed to have nothing outstanding about it until I began to play with the figures on social class. When I added together the percentage of people in social classes I and II (professional and managerial classes) they came out as lower than anywhere else in the borough - even than much more deprived areas. This gave me a crucial insight into the strongly working class nature of the community.

If you have put qualitative data into a computer then various techniques such as counting words frequently used can be stimulating.

Sharing with othersAgain the process of talking with others about the data you have collected can be one of the most stimulating approaches. This might be anything from casually talking about it with a friend outside your context to running a workshop with people from within your context. This is rather like the group processes described in the ‘flesh on the bones’ section but there should perhaps be more emphasis on prayer and imagination than sticking so rigidly to the data.

Suggested workshop for discerning the Spirit10 minutes Welcome and prayer with music if available e.g. Open my eyes

5-10 minutes Reflecting on the map

Put the map in the middle of the group. Use it as a focus to talk about the area: how you have experienced it, what you like about it, what you don’t like about it.

15 minutes Drawing out people’s experiences

Ask people to share their own experiences of the community. How they came to it. How it has changed etc. Encourage them to speak about feelings.

10 minutes Reflection time (one or more of these ideas might be used)

Read a Bible passage that speaks to some themes that you have experienced in the area.

Ask people to meditate on the map and their experience of the community whilst playing some music

Get people to walk around the community near where you are meeting (this might take a bit longer)

5-10 minutes Bring the people back together and talk more about the idea of discerning the Spirit. Use the passages from Numbers or Acts above.

Share some of the key issues that you have previously identified

20 minutes Begin a discussion about discerning the Spirit using these questions:

What is God doing in our community? What are the main forces at work in our community?

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What needs to be done? What might we have the resources to get involved in - what resources do we lack?

10 minutes Close with prayer and an opportunity to listen to what God might be saying

Drawing Bible parallelsTrying to draw connections between Bible passages and your context can also be helpful. This can be done at various levels:

The snap. This is an intuitive approach. Snap connections between your data and biblical themes, stories or characters can be drawn. These can be brainstormed and unhelpful ones rejected whilst helpful ones can be taken further.

Group exploration. Suitable biblical passages can be selected and studied alongside your context. Parables are particularly suitable for this.

Study. A more in-depth study can also be made. Maybe key words that have come up in your profile could be looked up in a concordance. Insights from ‘snaps’ and group explorations can also be followed up.

All these exercises are helping to stimulate your spiritual insights, letting the Word speak into your context. Other dimensions of the Christian tradition: sacraments, worship or even church buildings might provide keys for you to discern the Spirit in your context. The crucial issue is being open to how God is speaking whilst reflecting upon what you have learnt through doing the profile. Laurie Green’s book Let’s Do Theology goes into this in considerable detail.

Praying the contextPraying in your context can be a powerful way to discern the Spirit. The key, perhaps, is to draw a close connection between the spiritual practice of prayer and the realities of your context. This can be done within a workshop context as described above. So-called prayer walking would also fit into this category, although I would suggest that this isn’t done ‘blind’ but after sharing with the walkers your insights gathered through the community profile. It could also be taken one step further by not merely walking but engaging with people either informally in pubs and laundrettes etc. or more formerly by means of a door-to-door survey. At all points spiritual insight should be connected with observed reality so that the two inform each other.

Setting a goalGraham found that it was doing a Christmas play which gave him insight into his context. This can be attempted more intentionally by, say, preparing a service based on the insights gained from the community profile. This will force you into a position of thinking what your work has been all about - sometimes we need that motivation! Various goals which might help you get moving on discerning the Spirit include:

Doing a service based on community profile Writing a liturgy / prayer which incorporates your insights Putting on a drama which highlights local realities Using other creative arts e.g. banner making Writing a draft project proposal to meet identified needs

This final suggestion points towards our final section which concerns the process of moving from a community profile into community action.

The uses of community profile documentsA good document can be a very useful tool. It is able to open doors and make things happen in a way which more informal processes can’t. This does tend to depend, however, on the quality of the document. A few handwritten sheets of paper do not have the impact of a computer published report. A professional looking document can be used in these ways:

Getting Moving

This workbook is not designed as a guide to community action so I’ll not go into the details of setting up projects etc. There is, anyway, much more to getting moving than projects and a multitude of activities. We will therefore look at how you can connect your community profile with your ongoing mission.

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To get committees to address issues they have fought shy of previously To support funding applications To empower groups of local people who have lacked any evidence to support their

intuitions To say and act on things which everybody ‘knew’ but never got round to doing anything

about To get local government and other institutions to take seriously an issue they have ignored

(especially if promoted through the media) As a continuing resource for informing decision-making, making new workers aware of the

area etc.

The point is that the document itself assumes a life apart from the context it is seeking to describe. Depending on how it is received it might assume an almost totemic status - an example would be the report Faith in the City which by dint of government overreaction had a long and profound impact beyond what might have been expected. This can be very beneficial but can also be dangerous if the document assumes the status of a quasi-sacred text which can’t be questioned.

Steps towards projectsA project is about mobilizing a group of people and resources to address a specific need. Your community profile is a good way to identify needs so it is natural to think of them leading towards a project. We have also seen how the nature of a community profile is affected by the resources available to meet particular felt-needs. Nonetheless a community profile to be successful doesn’t have to lead to a project - it is just one possible outcome.

If you’re community profile has caused you to identify a need which you might be able to address the following is a checklist which might prove useful in moving towards a project.

How well is the need being met already? There is no need to duplicate provision, but maybe the need is only being partially met. For instance there maybe plenty of parent and toddler provision but if the use of it by black people is low that would be a clear area of need.

At what level do you want to respond? Various levels of response are always possible e.g. Small scale, voluntary with minimum budget Small scale mainly using volunteers with paid part-time coordinator Medium scale project employing full-time workers Major project involving a partnership with established organisation

How is it going to be funded? Is it going to need continuing revenue funding or just an initial grant to provide resources?

You may have volunteers identified to do the work but can you realistically expect them to keep it going for a significant period?

Can you find some outside expertise both in project development and in the area of need you are addressing?

A few key steps can be taken to begin to get a project off the ground:

Network. Meet with all the people who are significant to the need you have identified. Listen to them. This should give you a good idea of whether there are the resources and interest to develop a project.

Gather a development group. Whilst community profiling can be a fairly individual undertaking project development requires a group to take it forward. This should include if at all possible: People with expertise in your area People able to do the practicalities People with skills in enabling others and working with people

Develop an action plan. Identify what resources you will need and who are the key people you need to support you. Write up a timescale which shows what needs to be done when. Present the plan in an accessible and positive way. Use community profile data to support your action plan in a clearly focused and accessible way.

Identify and lobby the necessary decision-makers that you need to give you the go ahead. Now you are ready to begin the process of fundraising, volunteer gathering or whatever is

appropriate to your context.

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Further researchYour community profile might open up questions which need further investigation. In which case a more conventional research project might be undertaken. The crucial issue here will be to identify the problem which you want to address. This problem has to be something concrete such as ‘what has been the impact of long-term unemployment on young men in x estate?’ or ‘how can the gospel be communicated to unemployed young men in x estate?’.

Once a problem has been identified then a research project can be planned. A book such as Dave Erlandson’s Doing Naturalistic Inquiry or James Spradley’s Participant Observation might then prove a useful guide. Less academic in orientation is Ernest Stringer’s Action Research or Paul Burton’s Community Profiling these are also more geared to groups and a community work approach.

Personal developmentGraham found doing the community profile a significant personal milestone. To some extent he relegated the actual process of doing the profile to his own engagement with the community and, later, his career development. This dimension should never be underestimated. Firstly community profiles can teach you certain valuable skills such as using census data, how to win the confidence of people in the community and the writing of reports. Secondly it exposes you to new people, maybe in situations you are unfamiliar with. Thirdly it enables you to become aware of your community, able, as it were, to read a community - once you have done one or two it becomes second nature to be aware of the signs which communities give as to what is going on in them. It is therefore worth reflecting on your experience of doing a profile and thinking how you have developed through doing it. If a group has been doing it a group reflection would also be useful.

Changing the ethosPerhaps the most significant thing that a community profile can do is change the ethos of a church. It can help churches change from an obsession with internal matters and a sense of apprehension concerning its community to a genuine interest and engagement with it. A community profile can just as easily, however, be peripheral to the life of a church, barely affecting the way it actually operates. A few points can be made about what sort of community profiles are likely to change the ethos of a church.

Those which have the active and interested support of the leadership Those which are positive and hopeful, encouraging the church rather than overwhelming it Those which lead into some positive activity which involves church members Those which enable relationships to be established with people in the community Those which have people actively following them up

It goes back to the start of our process: know your constituency. Know why your doing the profile and who your doing it for. Gear it to the interests and resources of your constituency. If you can’t do this it is likely to be more a tool for your personal development than anything else.

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Bibliography

David Erlandson et al. Doing Naturalistic Inquiry. Sage 1993.David Morgan. Focus Groups as Qualitative Research. Sage 1988Dick Hobbs & Tim May. Interpreting the Field. OUP 1993.Egon Guba ed.. The Paradigm Dialog. Sage 1990.Ernest Stringer. Action Research. Sage 1996EUTP. Learning without Books. EUTP ?John Finney. The Well Church book. Scripture Union 1991.Greg Smith. Doing Questionnaires, Personal copy heldJames Ashdown. A Survey of Mission Audits. Unpublished 1993.James Ashdown. The Bellingham Profile. Unpublished 1996.James Hopewell. Congregation. Fortress Press 1987.James Spradley. Participant Observation. Holt, Rinehart and Winston 1979James Spradley. The Ethnographic Interview. Holt, Rinehart & Winston 1979.Laurie Green. Let’s Do Theology. Mowbray 1990.Nici Nelson & Susan Wright. Power and Participatory Development. Intermediate Technology Publications 1995.Paul Burton. Community Profiling - a guide to identifying local needs. University of Bristol School of Advanced Urban Studies 1995.Peter Reason ed.. Human Inquiry. John Wiley 1981.Peter Reason ed.. Participation in Human Inquiry. John Wiley 1994Tim May. Social Research. OUP 1993.

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Track Three: Worksheets

BEGINNINGSA walk round your patchYour team and your resourcesYour constituencyExplaining the Community ProfileAction plan

SKELETONCensus figuresOther figuresDocumentary and historical sourcesQuestions of history 61Report outline 62

PUTTING ON THE FLESH AND BEYONDIdentifying contactsFormulating questions 66Workshop outline: putting on the flesh 69Workshop outline: discerning the Spirit 70

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BeginningsIn this section worksheets are provided to help you with:

Making an initial observation of your area

Forming a team

Analyzing your consistency

Explaining to other people what the community profile is all about

Developing an Action Plan

A walk round your patch

Take a walk around your area your area at different times and record your impressions

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8 p.m. - as people are going to work

1 p.m. in the middle of the day

3.30 p.m. when schools finish

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11 p.m. Friday night

Other

Summary - key themes emerging36

Your team and your resourcesThese worksheets will help you to analyze what resources you have to do a community profile and what resources you might need to bring in.

They are designed as a guide only. You may or may not find them useful to fill in

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ExpertiseExpertise SourceExperience of doing community profiles

Awareness of community

Ability to build relationships in the community

Representatives of minority groups / cultures

Computer expertise and resources

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TimeThis is a list of possible jobs not all need to be attempted!

Jobs needing to be done

Person (s)

Census figures

Other figures (maybe useful to divide further)

Library and documentary research

Historical research

Photography

Questionnaire preparation, usage and analysisMapping

Presentation of figures for skeleton

Writing of skeleton report

Strategy for putting flesh on the bones - identifying contacts, etc.Interviewing

Group work

Writing report

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Analysis of data for discerning the Spirit

Workshop

Prayer

Biblical reflection

Practical action e.g. service

Writing final report

Project development

Planning follow-up

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ContactsPerson Has contacts with:

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Your constituency

This worksheet helps you analyze your constituency and therefore help you better understand how to focus your work.

It may be necessary to contact the people individually but you may also pick up their attitudes from casual conversation or a group discussion

Groups can also be looked at in the same way.

People to analyze should include:

Minister, priest and other leaders Lay leadership PCC, deacons or elders Other influential individuals or groups

Position Name

Contact Contacted?

Interests and commitments

Attitude to community profile

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Position Name

Contact Contacted?

Interests and commitments

Attitude to community profile

Position Name

Contact Contacted?

Interests and commitments

Attitude to community profile

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Explaining the Community ProfileThis worksheet gives you some help in thinking through how to explain the community profile to other people.

Write down as concisely as possible why you want to do the profile

Aims of community profile

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Main methods to be employed

Interests of people to whom you are explaining profile

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Benefits and perceived outcomes of community profile

Action planThis action plan helps you identify what needs to be done and gives you an initial timescale.

Action Begin Finish

Thinking and planning

Initial observations and walks

Discuss with leaders and other key people

Gather group / resource people

Start work on skeleton

Census figures

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Other figures

Documentary research

Historical research

Observations and photographs

Making map

Analysis and reflection on skeleton

Initial report

Initial presentation

Putting on the flesh

Identifying contacts and questions

Interviews

Participant observations

Group work

Analysis and reflection

Discerning the Spirit

Reflection on data

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Sharing and discussion

Final report writing

Moving on

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SkeletonIn this section worksheets are provided to help you with:

Collating census figures

Collating other statistical figures

Working with documentary and historical sources

Thinking about history creatively

Writing an initial report

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Census figuresBelow is a chart for collecting certain key figures from the census with the figures for London in the 2001 census included.

Percentages can be calculated by dividing figures by the appropriate total (population for people figures, households for household figures and economically active for unemployment figures).

Subjects included are typical ones. It might be relevant to include other subjects depending on your context or interests e.g. students or young black unemployed men.

Sometimes figures for 1991 will be presented differently from 2001 (and sometimes they are more difficult to get but can usually be found through the council - as can 1981 and 1971 figures but those earlier are much more difficult). This is particularly the case for ethnic groups as specific ethnic questions were not asked before 1991. The indicator used was ‘Head of household born in New Commonwealth and Pakistan’. One of the big differences with 2001 figures was the inclusion of a question about religion.

One ward should be sufficient to cover most ‘parishes’. Wards normally comprise two or more parishes themselves. If two is insufficient photocopy more copies as appropriate - sometimes it can be interesting to compare neighbouring wards.

Once the ward figures have been collected you may want to proceed with collecting output area figures. In which case prepare a similar grid with column for each district. Try to group the district into areas which are similar. This might be determined by geography e.g. a cluster of four districts which encompass an estate or only after looking at the figures. Housing tenure figures are a good guide to how districts can be grouped. You may also want to cut down on the figures you collect in order to concentrate on issues which the ward figures or other indicators have suggested to be important.

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2001 1991Wardnumbers

Ward% Ward numbers

Ward% Borough London

Name

Population

Households

Economically active

HousingtenureOwner Occupied 55.6%

Privately rented 15.5%

Other social renting and shared ownership

10.1%

Council 17.1%

SocialindicatorsNo central heating in household

7.8%

No car inhousehold

37.5%

1 parenthousehold

7.6%

Lone pensioner household

12.7%

Overcrowded (occupancy rate -1 or less)

21%

People with long-term illness

15.5%

Unemployed economically active

6.5%

People moved in last year

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Ethnic Groups White 71%

Black: Caribbean, African & other

11%

Asian: Indian, Pakistani & Bangladeshi

12%

Other ... 6%

Christian 58%

Muslim 8%

Hindu 4%

Head of household born in New Commonwealth or PakistanIrish born

Age 0-4 6.7%

5-9 6.3%

10-14 6.1%

15-19 5.8%

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20-24 7.4%

25-29 9.7%

30-34 9.7%

35-39 8.8%

40-44 7.1%

45-49 5.8%

50-54 5.7%

55-59 4.5%

60-64 3.9%

65-69 3.5%

70-74 3.1%

75-79 2.6%

80-84 1.7%

85+ 1.5%

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Other figuresThis can be a more complicated matter. See track two for ideas on how to find them. The following are worth investigating:

Local authority housing office: details of new tenants

Health authority (Public Health): details of mortality, hospital admissions etc.

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Local authority economic development units etc.: recent unemployment figures

Police: reported crime figures

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Schools: free school meals, special needs, English as second language etc.

Other sources to explore

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Documentary and historical sourcesThe most likely source of documentary material is the local library. This is likely to contain something about the history of your area and possibly some details about its social, economic and political makeup. Local historians and others with various kinds of commitment to the area may also possess useful documents. Make a list of these various sources and indicate what kind of information they contain.

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Document: Location:

Abstract:

Document: Location:

Abstract:

58

Document: Location:

Abstract:

Document: Location:

Abstract:

59

Document: Location:

Abstract:

Document: Location:

Abstract:

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Questions of historyBy answering these questions you should be able to put together a potted history of your area.

When was it first developed as a residential area?

What was it before that?

How has geography (physical, political and social) affected the area?

How was it developed? Who were the prime movers? What were their motives?

Who came to live here originally?

What was the image of the area they created?

When did the kind of people who lived here begin to change? (this question might need answering for more than one period)

What impact did this change have on the area - politically, economically, culturally and spiritually?

How did the area respond to significant changes e.g. world wars, new or re-building?

What significant events happened here? What was their impact?

What have been the key institutions and places in the area? How have they changed , declined or developed?

What famous people has the area produced? What kind of people were they? Why?

What role has the church played?

For each decade since residential development indicate the main changes that have occurred.

Divide its history into its main phases. Indicate what characterizes these phases and how they came to change into each other.

What effect has the area’s history had on its present?

How do you think it is going to change in the future?

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Report outline

IntroductionThe introduction should seek to give a sense of the area you are profiling and introduce briefly the main issues you want to draw attention to.

HistoryConcentrate on the present rather than antiquarian snippets. Seek to show how the area came to be like it is today.

GeographyA few careful comments will help illustrate your map.

Describe the physical geography indicating how it influences the community. Comment on the political boundaries which encompass the community. Describe the essential features of the built environment. Use figures and/or charts to describe the housing tenure and anything else which is significant.

PeopleThis is the heart of your skeleton. Describe the population in terms of:

Age and family structure Employment and class status Ethnicity Mobility and changeDraw appropriate connections between these categories e.g. ethnicity and employment and add any that seem significant e.g. students.

Use charts and/or maps to illustrate key issues if possible.

InstitutionsList and comment on the key institutions which affect life in your area e.g.

Churches Commercial Community and voluntary organisations Education Health Housing Housing Associations Local authority Police Social Services TransportAdd figures which are relevant to each institution or its area of operation.

Main issues emergingIdentify what seem to be the key issues which have emerged so far. These can form the basis for your subsequent investigation.

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Putting on the Flesh and beyondIn this section worksheets are provided to help with:

Identifying who might be useful contacts

Formulating questions for these contacts

Running workshops for Putting on the flesh and Discerning the Spirit

Worksheets are less useful from this point onwards as you will have to respond more directly to what you have found out.

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Identifying contactsThis form is designed to help you identify a range of helpful contacts and how you should approach and talk with them.

Your contacts should give you insight across the community. Seek to include people who give you access to these perspectives in your community:

Long established residents Newly arrived residents Children, young people, young adults, middle-aged, elderly Minority and/or marginalised groups People who manage / control housing People providing services e.g. healthcare, community care, education People with a long history of working in the community People responsible for law and order Political and community activists People with positions of power and influence

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Name

Area of experience and understanding

How can they best be contacted (who can introduce you)

Contact number

Address

Contact log

Date and nature of contact Result

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Write down the issues and questions you want to ask

Formulating questionsThis form is designed to help you decide which questions you should be asking. It should stimulate you to reflect on what you have been learning so as to be able to ask intelligent and stimulating questions.

Before you talk to each person / group you have identified as a suitable informant decide which key questions you want to ask them

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What are the key issues I have discerned?

What things about the area do I not understand?

What is my understanding of how things are changing in my area

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Who or what are the significant people, groups or institutions

What do I really want to find out?

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Workshop outline: putting on the fleshReproduced from Track Two

5 minutes Welcome

20 minutes Creating a shared map of the area.

Prepare a large outline of the area with a few distinguishing features e.g. roads, river or railway lines. Then get the group to fill in the following other features:

Other important roads Geographical features e.g. parks, hills Main buildings e.g. churches, pubs, community centers, shops, industries Where people in the group live Any particular areas e.g. estates or elderly housing etc.

Use the knowledge of the group to find out:

Where people gather What the reputation of various areas is What used to be different about the area etc.

Mark what people say on the map to create a record.

15 minutes Prepare a set of questions about the area based on the census material e.g. Introduce this by talking about finding out more about the people in the area.

1. How many people live in this area?2. How many of these people are under 5?3. How many of these people are Asian?etc.

These will have to be based on your own researches. It is a good idea to use your choice of questions to highlight areas and issues of importance. You can give people multiple choice answers if you like.

Once this has been completed then tell people what the census answers are. Have a discussion about this. Why might the census material be wrong? E.g. its out of date, certain sorts of people wouldn’t fill in the questionnaire (we know for instance that 20-30 year old men are underenumerated).

A short 5 minute talk about some of the key issues that have emerged for you in doing the community profile could be added at this point.

15 minutes Split the group into smaller groups and get them to list on flip chart sheets 10 things about the area which give them joy. Repeat this with things which bring sorrow.

15 minutes Bring the groups back together and compare what they have recorded. Notice what common themes emerge and if there are any disagreements. Use this to initiate a discussion about the area - is it a good place to live, what would improve it ...

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Workshop outline: discerning the SpiritReproduced from Track Two.

10 minutes Welcome and prayer with music if available e.g. Open my eyes

5-10 minutes Reflecting on the map

Put the map in the middle of the group. Use it as a focus to talk about the area: how you have experienced it, what you like about it, what you don’t like about it.

15 minutes Drawing out people’s experiences

Ask people to share their own experiences of the community. How they came to it. How it has changed etc. Encourage them to speak about feelings.

10 minutes Reflection time (one or more of these ideas might be used)

Read a Bible passage that speaks to some themes that you have experienced in the area.

Ask people to meditate on the map and their experience of the community whilst playing some music

Get people to walk around the community near where you are meeting (this might take a bit longer)

5-10 minutes Bring the people back together and talk more about the idea of discerning the Spirit. Use the passages from Exodus or Acts above.

Share some of the key issues that you have previously identified

20 minutes Begin a discussion about discerning the Spirit using these questions:

What is God doing in our community? What are the main forces at work in our community? What needs to be done? What might we have the resources to get involved in - what resources do we lack?

10 minutes Close with prayer and an opportunity to listen to what God might be saying

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