Belonging
It’s been a week of community and belonging. I've been lucky enough to belong to several quite different communities over the years, and each has taught me something slightly different about what it means to show up for other people, and to let them show up for you. And this week was a celebration of this, topped off with a visit to the Archers tribute garden at RHS Badminton. (Yes I am a paid-up member of the Archers Addicts.)
And so I’m reflecting on three communities to which I belong and what they bring to the people who belong to them.
The village gardening club
A new grief cafe in my local town
The professional network I joined when i stopped working full-time in school
The gardening club
Gardeners are by nature generous and collaborative and Holt Gardening Club is no different. On Monday some of us met together to plan the last pop-up plant sale of the season. There is a particular alchemy to a village plant sale. Trestle tables in the village hall (or outside it) groaning with the plants we’ve sown, grown and nurtured over the weeks and months and conversations about blight and blackspot, what grows well in shade and whether to leave your dahlias in the ground over winter. For the most part the homespun posters on noticeboards and jam jars of coins have been replaced by Facebook page updates, QR codes and a card machine but the general vibe remains the same. A garden teaches you that abundance is meant to be shared. And so when we divide our perennials we share them with each other and pot them up to sell, secure in the knowledge that they will grow well in local gardens and the proceeds will subsidise gardening members to increase their expertise by subsidising talks from experts and visits to other gardens as well as support a local therapeutic gardening charity Grow for Life.
The grief cafe
Grief is one of the loneliest experiences there is, and yet it is also one of the most universal. That paradox is exactly why we stepped in to run a grief cafe when the space managed by the Sue Ryder charity closed down. Since the start of the year we have been able to provide a safe space and in-person connection for locals who have each been bereaved, some recently, some many years ago. Nobody there is trying to fix anybody. They are simply witnessing one another, which is what grief actually needs.
And now we’ve managed to secure some funding from Wiltshire Council to map existing support networks, set up a resource hub which will be permanently available, run a launch event to showcase what support is available in the community for anyone who is grieving and connect those who work in the grief space.
The Solution-Focused Hub
The third community I met with this week is a professional one, but no less nourishing for that. Being a self-employed solution-focused practitioner can be lonely. Those of us who belong to this Bath-based hub are used to working in schools, part of a staffroom community but now we’re working alone. We’re holding space for students or clients who are unhappy, disregulated, anxious, grieving or stressed. Their lives and emotions are complicated and messy and we’re staying instead with their hopes, resources and exceptions to the difficulty. At times like these you need a group around who who gets it. That's where the wider practitioner community comes in to exchange ideas, support each other, help get things in perspective and celebrate each other’s successes. There is something wonderfully solution-focused about the community itself: we ask each other what's working, not what's wrong, and we build on each other's best moments of practice rather than picking over our worst.
What do all three have in common?
None of these communities set out to be therapeutic. The gardening club isn't a mental health intervention. The grief cafe isn't clinical group therapy and the practitioner network isn't a business support service. Yet they all do the same quiet work of reminding us that we matter to somebody.
There’s been a lot of talk in schools recently about the concept of belonging as a way of helping to rectify the attendance issues that have arisen amongst some students. In recent years the balance has shifted towards sanctions rather than identifying the underlying causes for poor attendance. A solution-focused approach looks at what’s working and encourages doing more of that in easy, small steps. Make students feel that they belong, that there is something valuable from joining in and they will come.
That’s what we’re doing with the gardening club, the grief cafe and the solution-focused hub.
Fostering a sense of belonging.