Spring 2006

Wellbeing and connectedness

Join the club

Rhonda Galbally advocates that being a member of a community group is the best, most inclusive leadership training and the values of such training lead towards a better society.

Social justice advocates need to be able to talk under wet cement, a skill that I learned in the drama club at Hampton High run by the inspirational Miss Dobbie.

Miss Dobbie was not the most beautiful woman in the world but she was the most desirable, capable of flushing great Shakespearean performances from an insecure mob of runty schoolkids. We were ready to go to any extremes to please her. And from the drama club, I went on to learn the formalities of speech making in the debating team, where I first felt the thrill of sanctioned verbal aggression.

At university, too, my formal education had its excitement and its boredom, but my informal education in clubs and societies was endlessly riveting. Some of these clubs were pretty frivolous, but still they helped me meet people and learn how to make friends. And some of the clubs I joined, like Amnesty, introduced me to ideas about human rights and justice and taught me that I could fight for change. The most important part of my university education was learning how to get involved in contributing to women’s rights, disability rights and human rights.

After university, I became a teacher at a time when teaching was being invigorated by radical advocacy. This gave me the experience and the background for my long transit through the private, philanthropic and public sectors.

At the Myer Foundation in the early eighties, I was responsible for spending millions of dollars of other people’s money doing good. Later, at VicHealth, I distributed grants that encouraged people to lead healthy lives. Certainly, much good was done, but somehow it didn’t seem to stay done. Those drawn up out of poverty or helped to stop smoking were promptly replaced by other people with the same woes. We seemed somehow to be missing the point.

I was lucky enough to happen across Professor Len Syme, emeritus professor of epidemiology at the University of California, Berkeley. Len had worked on a multitude of big public health programs and had analysed the flaws of each of them. He concluded that if you want people to be healthy and well, you have to listen to what they want rather than tell them what to do.

Len Syme designed successful programs based on the principle that being part of community is great for your health. It’s community itself, being a member of an empowered group, that improves community health on all indices. Participation is the key—getting people involved in community gains them the health and wellbeing outcomes other programs promise but are unable to deliver.

Numerous research studies now support Syme’s findings: people who are members of community groups stand out as healthy and strong. People who volunteer report higher levels of wellbeing. People who sing in the choir, all other variables controlled, live longer than those who don’t.

After I set up Our Community to serve Australia’s community groups, we established a conference that has become an Australia-wide movement called ‘Communities in Control’. To kick these off, we brought out both my mentor Len Syme and Professor Lisa Berkman of the Harvard School of Public Health.

Professor Berkman told participants, ‘ … what’s good for individuals and what’s good for the community is the same thing … Community groups are the engines that drive our ability to change behaviour, reduce morbidity, expand life expectancy and to innovate change’.

I know from my own life that this is an important truth, especially for vulnerable populations, so I now dedicate my time to empowering and supporting community groups. At Our Community, I work to convince the world (and especially policymakers) that the important thing is the population’s participation in community. Visit www.ourcommunity.com.au/

Volunteering is important, and volunteering to help others is good, but joining a community group and participating fully, having a say in what goes on, is even better. At their best, community groups promote trust, support, reciprocity and connectivity—tangible social capital that’s available to all participants.

On a wider scale, communities with masses of community groups tangibly have more social capital. These communities are healthier than those with few community groups and little community infrastructure. Social connectedness counts.

Professor Sir Michael Marmot of University College, London, examined the status of work and found a very clear relationship between health status and social differences as expressed by people’s roles and positions in the social gradient of the workplace.

Not only was social gradient a key factor in health, so too was how much control people have at work, how fairly they are treated, how interesting their work is and their participation in social networks. These differences also correlate with life expectancy.

Instinctively, Australians know that gaining a sense of control is vital. But where are we most likely to find it? More than 65 per cent of Australians vote with their feet and belong to community groups because they see them as a great place to have a go at finding a sense of belonging and control.

There are 700,000 community groups sprinkled across Australia like hundreds-and-thousands on bread. The best of them enable anyone and everyone to join, and allow every participant the opportunity to have a voice and a sense of control.

I want Australians everywhere to support community groups by giving them donations and time. People who love their bowls club, their choir, their junior soccer club, their community hall, their parents-and-friends club and their school drama group should support their groups by joining and participating as members.

And I want the community groups themselves to reach out and embrace new members, particularly those from diverse backgrounds, and to involve them in evolving strategies. Community groups that enable full participation are informally training leaders to talk under wet cement about the issues that matter in our society—justice, human rights and equity.

Being a member of a community group is the best, most inclusive and least elitist leadership training in existence, and the values of this leadership training lead towards a better society, not merely to personal gain.

I’m a realist. ‘I know that at their worst community groups are inward, exclusive, elitist, hierarchical, and clogged up with the same old faces. Yes, they can also be racist, sexist, ageist, able-bodyist, homophobic, and exclude new blood and new visions’ (Galbally 2004).

An important question, then, is to what degree can schools and universities work in partnership with community groups? This network of education institutions could conceivably be at the centre of communities; each and every one of them could be a community hub. Do many of them operate in this way or is facilitating the student engagement in community seen only as an add-on?

To what degree is the Australian education system designed to train new generations of community members in flexibility, participation, and working in teams with constructive interdependency, or does it rather promote competitiveness, conformity and hierarchy? And how can we foster joining up and joining in?

One alternative to the current rampant promotion of individualism is the promotion instead of the community infrastructure that overlaps with schools and universities—the clubs, societies and groups where young people can practise autonomy, responsibility and sociability.

A bewildering number of things have changed since I was in Miss Dobbie’s drama club, but the value of being a member of a community group has only increased in its importance.

References

Berkman, L (2003). ‘Why Strong Communities Hold the Key to Living Longer and Better’, at Communities in Control Conference, Melbourne.

Galbally, R (2004). Just Passions, Pluto Press, Melbourne.

Marmot, M (2006). ‘Status Syndrome: A challenge to medicine’, Journal of the American Medical Association 295(11), pp.1304–7.

Mattsson & Mattsson, (1998).‘To Sing in a Choir and Be Healthy: Which are the mediating mechanisms?’, Scandinavian Journal of Social Medicine, 26(3), p.238.

Rhonda Galbally is the chief executive officer of Our Community.

The author owns the copyright in this article. For information related to the reuse of this work in any form please contact the publisher denise.quinn@curriculum.edu.au