Heather Parker and Mark Hinton - Building bridges between communities
Rosemary Hartill continues her series on the ‘Rowntree Visionaries’ with a look at the work of two people who have established a pioneering project within the immigrant community in Coventry.
Mark Hinton is unlocking the door to a community room, kitchen and a couple of offices in the ground floor of a high-rise block. Behind us are two other recently refurbished blocks, grassy spaces and a clearly loved and unvandalised small garden.
We’re on the border of Hillfields and Foleshill, a short walk away from Coventry’s bus station and town centre. For years, this area of the city has been an arrival patch for new immigrants. In the fifties and sixties, people came over from the Caribbean in search of work in the then booming car industry. South Asians came too and more recently a new sweep of migrants – people from the Balkans, Kurds, Afghans, Poles, Africans and beyond. There are lots of students too.
Today, Foleshill is about forty-eight per cent Asian or Asian British, forty per cent white British, and a mix of other ethnic groups. It and neighbouring Hillfields are two of the poorest areas in the UK.
Five years ago, Mark Hinton and Heather Parker’s vision was to help weave an international web of ordinary peacemakers and strengthen their home community and many others, by building links with other communities around the world. Coventry already had an international profile as a city of international peace and reconciliation, and twenty-six twinned cities.
A former city councillor for the ward, Heather had twenty years’ experience of community activism. Mark had worked in community arts and development since 1989, including a stint doing circus teaching and street performances.
Inside the FolesHillfields Vision Project’s light and pleasant community room, ‘Welcome’ is spelt out in several languages. Welcome is the first thing that goes on here – including people when they arrive, taking care with greetings and language, giving proper time and attention.
Decorating the room are gifts and objects from around the world, and pictures of lively local events and people. On the right is a world map with pins scattered all over it. Above is the invitation, ‘Where do you have “friends and family”?’ Here, it’s a great way to begin getting to know someone.
‘And to help people getting to know each other,’ says Mark, ‘we do a lot of taking it in turns to listen.’
The team of a few paid staff and many volunteers facilitate this in many ways, often both informal and well structured. People have been trained differently about speaking and being listened to, Mark and Heather say: ‘and there will almost always be some people who take up more space and airtime than others. So we often get people to take equal time to listen and speak without interruption. We do this in pairs, in small mixed groups, in the middle of noisy parties and in dialogue events.’
They’ve found that all this works best in a relaxed and friendly atmosphere, when people are having fun, and when things are flexible and fluid. And once relationships are established, it’s easier then to name difficult issues.
And there are difficult issues. They talk directly about racism, sexism, Islamophobia, homophobia, anti-Jewish feelings, migration, colonialism, religion, violence, capitalism and much more: ‘It’s not about winning arguments, but learning from others’ perspectives.’
To some extent, they say, all the different communities are disengaged from each other. Faith, social class or educational background can divide as much as ethnicity or geographical background. Longer-established immigrants sometimes feel resentful about newer ones.
Holding out the bigger picture remains important. Both thinking and acting, locally and globally, was at the heart of their application to JRCT.
Heather and Mark wrote their joint job-share application when staying with friends in rural Kenya, during a year out travelling with their family. Inspired by their encounters in other countries too, they had a vision of linking people in their area with people in the developing world in creative, meaningful ways – school links, interactive websites, arts projects, fair trade, exchange visits and projects.
They thought that actively pursuing links with the developing world would help everyone develop a wider perspective on their own situation.
They began energetically. Local young people went to Romania and Kenya as community ambassadors. They continued to develop and deliver (with the help of up to 150 volunteers a year) a global citizenship programme for the local primary school, first started in 2001. A phone link was set up between the school and 110 children in Kenya.
Local people at both ends helped overcome language barriers and some questions provoked interesting exchanges – ‘How many cows do you have?’ or ‘What’s your favourite TV programme?’ – both reasonable to the enquirer and puzzling to the answerer.
Two years later, local schools raised funds to bring over three Kenyans – two teachers and a community organiser. Part of the celebration was a great Africa Day attended by a wide variety of Kenyans.
There have been a number of other international visitors. But in practice a lot of the international things they had imagined doing turned out to be harder than expected. They realised that to make the link with Kenya neither patronising nor colonial would take a huge amount of time, effort and money. Moreover, interactive websites are complex to set up and sustain.
They learned that a global perspective was a crucial part of the work, but long-haul jet flights were not. The world was already in Coventry. The things they tried worked well enough to recruit a strong and committed team that represents that world well, a team that now forms the FolesHillfields Vision Project.
The population is a shifting, transient one, but several hundred local people are linked to the centre at any one time. The centre has hosted youth groups, a gardening club, a varied volunteering programme for adults and young people, a PeaceJam youth group, family linking lunches, women’s groups, men’s health work and intercultural music events. Then there’s been a three-week Festival of Friendship involving twenty-one events, Father’s Day picnics, Women’s peace events – and numerous other creative, interesting times for people to share their experiences or just to hang out together.
They say the JRCT money has freed them to experiment and try to do a whole bunch of things that they couldn’t possibly have done had they been tied to specific outputs and targets. In fact, they say that without it they could hardly have started the work at all.
Naturally, in practice (as with many so-called job-shares) both of them worked many more hours than half-time. Managing diverse and changing volunteers and staff is never easy.
But they remain very conscious of their delicate position as two white people leading a community project in such a diverse area. ‘We had some good challenges from close friends who’ve taken us up on it. As white people, we’re bound to be dumb sometimes, not understanding things.’
To make the project truly diverse, there needs to be a constant, conscious sustained effort: ‘We have to notice who is coming and who isn’t coming, think about why certain groups of people aren’t coming and do something to change that.’ It has not always been easy to engage white people, for example, or Kurds, or Roma.
In November 2008, FolesHillfields Vision Project won the £10,000 National Award for Bridging Cultures from the Baring Foundation. The category was for voluntary organisations with under £1m turnover – their turnover was around £30,000. They deserve more awards.
