Interrogating race, power, class and privilege.
Join me in taking a dive into my working week through the lens of embracing a slower pace as an act of radical love for shifting power to communities.
Frustrations
My role in the Community Mental Health Transformation has been met with many frustrations from others about the slow pace of change and why we aren’t yet seeing clear outcomes of better services for underrepresented communities actively accessing the system. In responding to this question, an excellent place to start is to acknowledge that if real, sustainable change on this scale were being claimed to be concluded in the space of 2–3 years then this would be a red flag.
The Scope
The transformation is a partnership across the public sector (in this case CWPT), third sector (Grapevine among others), and local people. CWPT is a system that holds a lot of decision-making power and lives in a culture of bottom-up change being almost non-existent. Grapevine is enabling people to examine this culture and embrace complex systems change that starts from the bottom up. We are essentially reversing the way that decisions and outcomes have been allocated in a system for decades.
Systems Change
Our Grapevine approach to empowering communities acknowledges and interrogates how race, power, class, and privilege sit within the system. This comes from a place of zero assumptions, listening to and being guided by the communities we are working with. This week saw us getting together to develop a social mapping tool to collate insights across multiple services and organisations that will ultimately be used to achieve tangible change. A tool that will be robust and powerful. Developing it is a time-consuming but crucial part of the process. Grapevine identified the need for the tool to hold people accountable to the diversity of communities they are working with and be radically transparent when insights have come from ‘professionals’ rather than the people experiencing the barriers themselves.
I’d like you to imagine a process where this tool had instead been dictated to us by CWPT. This would be quicker, yes, but it wouldn’t allow for a process to grow over time or iron out significant limitations identified by the community. This is an example of where our process takes longer to get it right and so a quicker method would not be desired. Here I am grateful that CWPT is not doing for us what we can do for ourselves. We are ultimately shifting power to communities that have been continually underrepresented due to a system that churned people through a process of consultation rather than coproduction and so by default didn’t enable the underrepresented communities to gain the power to hold the system accountable to change.
