How did I get into community development?

I come from a generation where ‘clever’ girls had three choices.  My careers advice at school was teaching, nursing or secretarial.  I chose to study History at university because I was interested in people and taught History in secondary schools until the cusp of my 30s.

I wasn’t a bad teacher.  I cared about my subject and the students, but when I compare myself then with the teachers I saw in the classroom when I went back in to an educational environment post Cameroon, there is no comparison.  They are all singing and dancing.  When I taught, young people did pretty much the same piece of work for an hour and were OK about it and I taught in comprehensives. It would be deemed boring and uninspiring now.

My first manager in The Children’s Society, who set me off on my journey of being inspired by supervision and community development, directed me to read ‘Passages: Predictable Crises of Adult Life’ by Gail Sheehy.  What I remember about the book, and my daughter referred to it in the last 6 months, is that people live life in decades and often on the cusp of a new decade will make an influential change.  My influential change was to move from teaching, (I was never in to rules, but the holistic development of young people) into PR (which was very short-lived as my employer went bust) and then in to a project manager role.  Basically I was set up in a room in a church on a housing estate in Marsh Farm, Luton, told to do some work with women and children and left to get on with it.

I discovered I have a gift for community development.  It gets me in to all sorts of trouble.  I think outside the box.  I was hopeless at taking colleagues outside my immediate team with me.  My stint in PR was too brief to teach me early on about the power of branding and positive media messages.  I made some howlers of mistakes, but I was inspired, and grounded enough to be inspiring to some other people rather than purely messianic.

When I am employed in a community development role, the days fly by and it never seems like work.