Urgency and Agency
Hello all @Woodbinehealth,
I really connect with all you’ve said here and in particular you’re sense of urgency and the imperative of radically different approaches to health and its broader determinants. I have often found myself at well intentioned workshops with rooms full of professionals working hard at designing perfect interventions that will deliver the miraculous ‘product’ of health to our communities. I’m intensely frustrated by the waste of human resources and energy when surely it must be obvious that health is not simply the output of professional ‘interventions’ (even the clinical language makes me recoil). Surely it’s obvious that health is also fundamentally the natural outcome of healthy communities, relationships and systems - including our political and economic systems.
The work I’m involved in at GalGael came out of fires protesting motorways bringing asthma and nature deprivation to communities in Glasgow already hard pressed. We created relative safety admist a housing scheme where there was little. We learnt along the way - by accident - the sense of agency that comes from ‘the act of sharing responsibilities’ within the context of the encampment. We chose to continue to work with that sense of agency and still do so 20 years after the motorway was built. We’ve continued learning and particularly the extent to which that sense of agency is profoundly connected to our health. We’re lucky in Scotland to have had a recent Government Chief Medical Officer who underlined the importance of work on salutogenesis - the importance of studying what makes us healthy rather than disease itself - and the role that our sense of control over our own lives plays in our health; both physical and mental. (Harry Burns - I believe he is regularly in NY)
For a while we were disheartened to see people we’d worked with on issues of addiction appear back at our doors. What were we doing wrong? We were adamant that we did not want to be another revolving door for people stuck in the cogs of a poverty industry or disease factory. Slowly we realised - by classical ‘analysing our own reality’ - that the systems and relationships beyond our doors and beyond our direct influence were considerably more effective at creating disease and dysfunction than we could ever be at resolving it - especially on grant funded (frequently cut) project work, creating environments where people could find greater health and humanity. And now we know the imperative of both - to be there when people need us on the renewed understanding that many diseases and social ills are adaptations to the dysfunction in our wider systems. On its own, this would amount to little more than sticking a finger in a crack in the harbour wall in the face of a tsunami. So now we understand that working to influence system change is also essential to not only the health in individuals but increasingly the survival of our communities. I find what Deborah Frieze refers to as ‘hospicing the dying’ in relation to systems helpful - an important aspect of care work in our times. What is called for as old systems collapse? How do we work to illuminate and support the emergence of the new?
These thoughts led to me proposing a track for the Open Village - see more here. If you are delivering a session - I would love to hear more and stay in touch as the programme shapes up.
@Noemi - happy to come across your link. I love the notion of a Centre for Political Beauty. There seems to be something genuinely powerful and thought provoking when we put two words together that we wouldn’t normally associate at all.
There is much that is quite overwhelming in the world - loss, grief, fear, uncertainty, greed. In standing firm in the face of this, the words of Dr. Cornel West regularly come to mind; ‘I cannot be an optimist - but I am a prisoner of hope’. They seem to hold the tension between current realities and possible futures beautifully.