Core Values: Community Development
For SVB a Community Development approach to mental health is premised on the belief that issues such as poverty, racism, loneliness, relationship difficulties, domestic violence, sexual abuse, spiritual dilemmas are often at the heart of mental health crisis.
Sharing Voices believes that Community Development provides an effective way of working with people living with mental distress. Community Development is a democratic process.
It shifts the power dynamic and places local people at the heart of a transforming process.
Community Development has always been focused on improving well being with a concern for economic, social and environmental factors espousing a commitment to equality and empowerment.
It is well recognised as an effective way of working with disaffected, disengaged, disenfranchised sections of the community.
It provides the opportunity for people to acquire skills and confidence to devise their own solutions thereby fostering a sense of ownership of their services and reducing dependency on others.
Cohesion and social inclusion are recognised aims of Community Development work.
The Community Development workers at Sharing Voices undertake and perform various roles when engaging with communities these included:
- Empowering and supporting individual involvement
- Enabling the development of new and existing What We Do
- Identifying issues and promoting involvement in governance
- Building networks and links in the community
Whilst we engage local people living with distress in the above process Sharing Voices also believes that notions of development exist within all communities and cultures and therefore we need to tap into and enable people to connect with development ideals from their own backgrounds.
It’s the role of the Community Development Workers to become engrossed in an organic evolving environment in an enabling role.
We very much support and up hold the view that just as people who have experienced distress are experts by experience.
Communities are also experts and hold a wealth of knowledge about what the problems are that result in people becoming distressed, marginalized and so forth.
Consequently they also know what the solutions are and it is their priorities and agendas that we hope are central to any developments that supported by the initiative and that inform services locally.