Listening  and Enabling

 

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I started work as a community worker at the Zebra Project in the 1980s and trained at Goldsmith's College in the 1990s and earlier at the Urban Theology Unit and Birkbeck College. From 2000-2008 I was a senior practitioner with Barnardos CANDL project. My main interest has been working with grassroots groups and also networking across a wide range of projects and organizations.

My particular areas of work have been working with faith-based groups (I was a lay pastor for three years) and more recently, arising from personal experience, working with people with long-term illness. 

Breathing space

Over the past 10 years face-to-face work with individuals, and occasionally with groups, has gradually become a more important part of my work sometimes I have called this nonmanagerial supervision, sometimes work consultancy, sometimes just personal support. I wanted, however, to equip myself to do this work better, so together with Geoffrey Court of Circle Works and some other colleagues we developed a reflective process which led to us coining the phrase Breathing Space to describe what we found ourselves doing.

Breathing Space doesn't have a defined methodology it is more about creating a safe space where people can explore their own questions and enter into dialogue with an attentive fellow traveler. We have, however, produced these documents which attempt to capture something of the spirit of Breathing Space.

Breathing space poem
Breathing space: the answers to our questions!

Facilitation

Over my years as a community worker I have accompanied many groups as they have sought to develop and flourish as community organizations this has involved:

Conducting participative evaluations
Facilitating meetings
Being a sounding board
Writing reports
Giving advice
Being a consultant to management committees
Facilitating away days
etc.

I have particularly enjoyed offering long-term support to organizations over many years. My approach to working with groups and organizations is summarized in these documents

Working with groups
Working with faith communities
The impact of the target culture

Research

I have always been interested in research and therefore took a Masters in Applied Anthropology from Goldsmith's College. I have some experience in quantitative methods -- particularly in the use of neighborhood statistics such as the census, but I am particularly interested in qualitative and participative methods. That is approaches which treat the people on the ground as the experts and seeks to enable them to educate themselves through learning more about what they are doing. These documents summarize my approach

Community profiling
Evaluation
Listening


Charges

Work History