Conclusion and celebration

Summary

Prominent throughout this book has been social justice and the need to challenge neoliberalism. One takeaway thought is that we all need to be political. As Freire said in the 1970s (Freire, 2018), education is, in itself, political, and we must allow people to set their own agenda for their learning and development. Being political is not easy and we do a disservice to our communities if we do not engage with theory and make the links. To support this work, we need community workers who are brave and politically engaged themselves.

During the Black lives Matter racial protests in the UK, Charis Robertson (2022) was in agreement with the authors about being politically aware:

‘You know, this [community work] isn't formal education; we respond to whatever is in the news, in the headlines, and this is going to be in the young people's radar. And our team were incredibly reluctant to go anywhere near it and put anything out online. They were concerned about opening up cans of worms and how to manage it online during lockdown. … And so I think the safety question is valid, but one of the questions is around whose needs is this about and how are we supporting every party's needs in this? Because they’re all valid, but we shouldn't shy away from stuff because it's hard.’ (Charis Robertson, 2022, Focus Group)

This is a profession that asks a lot of us. Our work is about identifying needs, co-designing programmes of learning, reducing barriers and addressing power imbalances. Research by McArdle et al (2013) showed that good professional educators are born, not made. To understand why what we do matters, as community workers we need empathy, something which arguably cannot be taught. The work we do is complex and we are frequently asked to step outside our comfort zone and engage across differences; it is demanding as we seek to engage with communities at times and in places that reduce the barriers for them; it can be heartbreaking as we see the discrimination faced by the communities we serve and the trauma that they carry with them; it is sometimes risky, and we often find ourselves working against the desired outcome of our employer or funder. But the work we do is rewarding and life changing for the communities we serve and for us as workers.