Discovering Community Psychology

This week we welcome Rachel McKail from MAC-UK and Katy Dawe and Shakira Henry from Art Against Knives (AAK). AAK are a London based organisation that intervene early to help young people to embed creative spaces in London’s most isolated communities, co-designed with young people, that build on their strengths and create opportunity.

Rachel is a Clinical Psychologist, who is MAC-UKs lead for the Trusted Relationships project, which is in partnership with AAK. Rachel reflects that within Clinical Psychology we talk a lot about social inequality, prevention and co-production and wonders if sometimes as a profession we find it hard to say we don’t really know what we are doing with this work. Rachel says that to do community work as Clinical Psychologists, we need to work alongside the incredible people who’ve been doing this work for decades and who are already pushing for change.

Rachel explains that Community Psychology is very important to her, and that the best part of her job is working with AAK, who she says inject so much energy, love and care into the work that they do. Rachel describes that at AAK, co-production is weaved into the fabric of everything they do and that she learns so much from working with them.

Shakira has worked at AAK for five years, she has had various different roles with the charity and is currently a Programme Manager. Shakira describes AAK as a hardworking collective and a phenomenal charity who do what they say on the tin: keeping young people at the forefront of everything that they do. Shakira says that working alongside MAC-UK has enabled spaces for the team to learn, enhance their understanding and develop.

Katy is the founder of the charity AAK, established in 2010 in response to the stabbing of her best friend Oliver Hemsley. Katy described that when listening to young people and their communities to understand what could be done, it became very clear that nobody was asking young people; just making decisions for them. So the charity was built on the value co-production. From the start, young people were put in the lead of the intervention, investing in their ideas and supporting them in driving their own solutions. Katy recently left the charity having run it for 10 years and the charity has welcomed a new CEO Dr Sally Zlotowitz who joined us on the Discovering Community podcast earlier this year.

In this week’s episode Rachel, Katy and Shakira talk about their work together through the Trusted Relationships Programme. A 4-year partnership between AAK, MAC-UK, 0a Local Authority, to reduce the risk of criminal and sexual exploitation. Using AAK’s model of creative spaces to establish trusted relationships with young people, and utilising these to connect then with the systems around them at a pace, and in a space that works for them. Championing systems to do things differently, MAC-UK’s role is to support the embedding of psychologically informed environments, co-production and the MAC-UK INTEGRATE model.

AAK and MAC-UK came together, when AAK decided to take a community-based approach in Barnet recognising the need there. AAK began spending time with young people, hanging out, painting their nails and getting to know a group of young women from one estate. Those young women told AAK that they wanted to open a nail shop and helped shape the values of AAK today.

Art Against Knives: https://www.artagainstknives.com Twitter: @ArtAgainstKnive Instagram: artagainstknives dollisdollsnails nw9nails the_labaak 

Today’s guests are Annie Mitchell & Rachel Purtell. Annie (@annieingarden) is a clinical + community psychologist who when working on the DClin at Exeter used her position to promote service user involvement in research, by engaging people in the shaping of knowledge. Rachel joined the project bringing a radical approach that combined her MA in Disability Studies, looking at the social model of disability, with her experience working in a service user led organisation, which called for accountability from commissioners.

They speak about being radical and creating a culture change by promoting service user involvement in research. They give us 10 awesome tips for working effectively in partnership with others; and encourage us to think critically about power. 

Resources

Deanne is a senior lecturer at Nottingham Trent University, previously lecturing in community psychology at the University of East London. Deanne poetically describes her journey into community psychology, entering a doctoral programme that combined community, liberaton and ecopsychology. She remembers being blown away reading Frantz Fanon, a black philosopher and psychoanalyst from the global south. This opened her mind to the way that the social world effects people psychologically. 

Deanne sees community psychology as a theoretical framework that allows us to bring psychological insight to decolonising the world, breaking the hierarchies produced through racism, classism, heteronormativity, ableism, ageism. 

She shares her understanding of participatory action research as a democratic process of knowledge seeking, crucially about transformation. Deanne references the importance of Orlando Fals Borda’s work in the field of PAR. 

Deanne talks about her work in Jamaica in 2010 where she collaborated on a platform for people affected by a human rights atrocity to be able to tell their story through a film and an art installation.

Deanne is about to start a project called Transforming Inequalities at Nottingham Trent University where she hopes people will start to name and engage with decoloniality. She reflects on decolonising the curriculum, a movement that emerged in South Africa where students pushed back against classism and the need for decolonisation to be a democratic process.

Deanne explains that liberation psychology is unapologetic about naming oppression as the experience of the majority world. Referencing Ignacio Martin Baro and his emphasis on prioritising the poor, she reflects on a middle class bias in psychology and the need to turn our energy to those who are oppressed.

Deanne talks about collective trauma in the context of the covid-19 pandemic. She reflects on the idea of psychosocial accompaniment and Mary Watkins book on mutual accompaniment for those working in human services. Deanne thinks we’ve actually been living in an anxiety and depression pandemic for some time despite psychotropic and psychotherapeutic attempts to respond to this, highlighting a different approach needed.

Deanne talks about the need to run towards coloniality and reduce pervasive bystanding. Deanne suggests those starting out in their exploration of these ideas “go south” and read the writings of those who first wrote about these ideas such as Paulo Friere, Orlando Fals Border and Maritza Montera. Deanne says the global south is a pivot point for community psychology and we should not start with diluted readings from the global north. She discusses the need to create spaces in organisations such as the NHS for meaningful dialogue remembering trust takes time.

Deanne reflects on some critiques of community psychology in that it has lost contact with psychological worlds and the fact that many people need support to articulate their inner worlds. She closes discussing the idea that we cannot empower each other, that the task is rather reshaping the world to remove the blocks to peoples lives, structurally, systemically and in policies.

A conversation with Dr Maria Qureshi, a Clinical and Community Psychologist in West London and Senior Lecturer at the University of East London and visiting lecturer at the University of Hertfordshire. In this episode, Maria speaks about her use of community psychology approaches both within and outside of the NHS and shares some valuable reflections about the meaning of this work to her, as well as the barriers and facilitators of these approaches.

Maria explains how she has used community psychology approaches within her local and the wider Muslim community to support people’s wellbeing, coproducing a poster with women from the community as part of the earlier small scale mosque project on wellbeing. She also challenges the notion that psychology is a Western ideal, and increased its accessibility and take up of the support from these groups. Maria also reflects on her own journey and how discovering community psychology gave a name for the ways she had been working, enabling her to reconnect with her values.