Scotland: National Rural Network
Connecting Rural Scotland - Promoting Rural Growth

By John Gold

My name's John and I'm a Community Animator

If there's one thing that's stirred up more conversation than anything else in the past year since I took up my post with the Southern Uplands Partnership as a ‘Community Animator', it would have to be my title!

‘One who gives new spirit and life to'* was not a phrase which featured in my job description, nor do I claim to live up to that awesome task, but it's a phrase to which I return often in an attempt to reassess myself and my role in the light of progress.

In that year I've also managed to coin my own phraseology, which I think describes the work that I do. I ‘animate local people into action', if you like, stir up activism and try to help communities to discover and realise their potential. However, my work with the Communities on the Edge project has been every bit as much about a process of self discovery and personal growth than anything else, and I look forward to reflecting on my journey with you in the coming months.

‘Awareness' has been a key theme for me recently. Self-awareness, the awareness of others around me, peoples varying perceptions and misconceptions. I've also become aware of the way I see the community in which I live and have begun to understand the way others view that same community. It's been a hugely rewarding and challenging time. The challenge, I suppose, lies in the question ‘So what do I do with this new awareness?'

I've always been a firm believer in a positive attitude. It's such a productive energy and can overcome the most daunting of hurdles. And when that's combined with a passion for place, an appreciation of all that is good about a community, the results can be overwhelming. I recently had the privilege of visiting The CatStrand, a community facility in New Galloway created by the people of the Glenkens Community and Arts Trust. Their magnificent building is a living, breathing space, which is testimony to the hard work, enthusiasm and positive energy of one small community.

Back home in Douglas, South Lanarkshire, Communities on the Edge promotes an asset based approach to rural community development. It's a process, which challenges traditional needs-based models of rural development, but it also challenges communities to appreciate the uniqueness and diversity of their own place. It's a process which resists getting caught up in identifying needs and creating wish lists, but emphasises the good things about an area around which people can come together to develop ways in which to build on the assets in order to sustain and enhance them for future generations.

More and more, I see my job as enabling local people to see their communities in a different light, in an alternative way. The transformational effect that different ways of looking at things can have has impacted on me greatly over the past year. It's now my turn to help others have that opportunity.

Perhaps ‘one who gives new spirit and life to' isn't so far off the mark after all . . .

*Anne Hope and Sally Timmel, ‘Training for Transformation', ITDG, 1984

This article first appeared on the Rural Gateway website.