I doubt there is anyone working in community services in Queensland, maybe even Australia, who could spend 5 minutes in a room with two other colleagues and not hear the phrase “it's all about relationships”. Maybe not that exact phrase, but something pretty close to it. My point is that this idea – i.e. that the foundation of social and community services work is relationships – is ubiquitous.
So I'm about to do severe damage to my future career prospects1 in this sector by stating that we need to stop saying “it's all about relationships.” It's not that I disagree, it's just that I'm not sure what people mean any more by “relationship”, let alone who it is they think it's important to have one with. I think we need to start being a little more specific about these things because there's a risk that 'relationship' is coming to mean so many things it's actually losing meaning. There, I said it. Career One, here I come.
So, attention-grabbing lines aside, what I'm concerned about is that the term 'relationship' is being used as a catchall for all sorts of different connections – some that are worthy of the term 'relationship' and some that aren't – that we have with users of our service, stakeholders, colleagues, community members and so on.
Perhaps what worries me more though is that we, the community sector, seem to be putting more value on the relationships we build with each other than on the relationships we build with the people who live in the communities we work in. I'm not talking here about individual worker-client 'relationships'. I'm talking about the relationships that a service, or group of services have with the community that it or they serve.
I recently attended a regional community services planning forum and alll of the talk about relationship building (bar one outstanding comment) on this day was about building relationships with other services. Why? So that we can offer better, more holistic services for the community and meet the needs of 'clients/consumers/users' better. That's all good and absolutely necessary. However there are two assumptions built into this view that are a bit troublesome – at least in the context of this planning conference and others like it.
The first one that I don't want to expand on too much here is the assumption that service to service relationships will: make it easier for people to find the service they need; help build a 'holistic' service system; AND that services have capacity to do more of what they do for the new clients that a holistic service system will bring. But many services don't have extra capacity. Many services have to turn people away or put them on waiting lists. One service I spoke to had a waiting list one day, and then didn't the next. Their waiting list had just grown too big and too long and then it was meaningless. And perhaps just too depressing for all concerned to refer to this thing that always seemed to grow and never ended. Fair enough.
The second assumption is that 'clients/consumers/users' (let's just call them community members) actually want to find and use these better, more holistic services that addressed the issues that we (community services) all identified on the day (like mental health, homelessness, early intervention, parenting etc etc). After all no-one had actually asked them. Not really. Not in the way that you'd ask someone you had a relationship with. There may have been a survey by an agency or a consultant, but if there was though no-one mentioned it (myself included). I suspect that even if the question had been asked and an answer given, that there was certainly no conversation – which is what you have in relationships.
It's true that most relationships start with a question. Such as 'how are you?', 'what can I get you?', 'what did you think of that game?', 'what do you do?'. But they don't stop there, they keep going. In a relationship (a good one anyway) the questions and answers flow both ways. So a really good relationship is like one big conversation that never really ends. You start off getting to know each other a bit more, you ask a few questions, exchange a bit more information, you tell some good stories. You might even stretch the truth, but over time you each come to recognise the difference between telling a good story just for fun, and sharing home truths. And in good relationships both of you win. You both learn something.
I'm not so sure though that when many of us in community services talk about 'relationships' that this is what we mean. Certainly not on a bigger picture, whole of community level. When we say “it's all about relationships” I think what we're saying is that it's important to have trust and rapport with individual clients and our colleagues in other services. True. However when it comes to the bigger picture planning of a service, or of services in a region, we need relationships with communities, and these are vastly different to (but just as complex as) the relationships we build with individual clients.
Of course I'm simplifying here. Partnerships between services are important. Extremely important. Those waiting lists I mentioned above really can be shortened in some cases. And the need for crisis services can be lessened if services are able to work together and find ways to build preventative services. But there's a third party that needs to be in on the conversation - and part of the relationship – and that's the community in which these services will be delivered.
So how can we do that? What are some ways of including communities in the conversation? Indeed is there any evidence that doing so actually makes a difference? Or is it just nostalgic poppy-cock to think that community members should have a role in planning community services? Have we become so professionalised that service planning is now the domain of experts? I hope not.
