animating the "quiet Voice"

Animating the “Quiet Voice”   
 
OK, so what do we mean by Quiet Voice? The traditional term would be “Hard to Reach” but those involved in community work know, in their gut, that this is no longer a useful term. One of the biggest problems with it is that it implies that all residents are passively waiting to be activated by someone else’s ideas; that they don’t already have social networks and cultural systems that are working for them.  It can make “supplicants” of people – i.e. grouping and identifying them as individuals in need. 
 
The other difficulty is that it vastly underestimates the percentage of individuals in any community who actively choose to disengage, putting themselves on “mute”.  This dissatisfaction can be for many reasons – consultation fatigue, disillusion with local and governmental politics or simply working too hard and being too tired to participate.  The more extreme end of this reaction is represented by those who are in fact angry at what they perceive as repeated top down initiatives, parachuted into their communities and then whipped out again when the funding dries up.

We believe that “Quiet Voice” is a more appropriate term as it captures both of these groups, including those who are experiencing more recognisable barriers to participation, and is therefore a more accurate reflection of the granularity of 21st century community.

So, "Quiet Voice" is not a personality type, although many people may prefer not to speak in social settings.

"Quiet Voice" not a social demographic, although people who are less educated and practiced in sharing their views may choose to be quiet.

It is in fact A REACTION.  Any individual can be knocked into a quiet state if the invitation to participate isn't right.  Quiet Voice Methodology recognises that the way we turn up as community workers; how we present our invitation and the measures we take to "level the playing field" are essential ingredients in animating the Quiet Voice.  


What’s the difference between “engagement” and “animation”?

Again, we’d suggest that community “engagement” is a term no longer fit for work in our modern communities. 

How familiar is the following to you, as a community worker?  You've been given a brief dictated by the funding that requires you to bring people out of their homes to join you in your funder's vision of what is needed in that community.  And you have some success.  There are individuals there at your event but you know, because you're good at your job, that those people are already animated. That is, they are the first responders to this kind of call. They're already active community members and by and large that's OK. The funder only asks you to count numbers. Most initiatives don't require an understanding of how "community" breaks down into already animated voices and Quiet Voices so the question "Who's NOT here?" largely goes unasked.  Yet we know, don't we?  "Engagement" doesn't reach the Quiet Voice.

It doesn't reach the Quiet Voice because funding generally sets very specific criteria for outcome and impact.  In other words, it’s the funder who decides what the focus of the project will be and this is usually about fixing a problem.  More than this, most funded projects specify exactly which segments of the community must be reached, thereby greatly enhancing the notion of “supplicants”, i.e. communities in need of improvement.  All of these things can be very off-putting.

By simultaneously taking away the important first stage of any community conversation where THEY get to present their OWN description of themselves and by then communicating only with those members who are willing to present as needy, we’ve now come to the point where “engagement” is actively causing disengagement!

So, Interwoven has adopted a preference for the term “animation”.  Community animation has a long tradition, particularly on the continent where an “animateur” was someone who breathed life into activity.  The boundaries were often blurred between community education, arts and other kinds of activism because it was not imposed top down but, rather, grown from the rich and diverse ‘soils’ of the community itself.

It’s main benefit though is that it doesn’t seek to engage residents in our idea of what they should do or what needs to be fixed.  Rather it means standing shoulder to shoulder with them, long-term, and asks “what would you like to do?”  In this way we seek to encourage residents to become the active agents of their own change.

We explore these important concepts and much, much more in our Introduction to Quiet Voice Methodology half-day workshops and Quiet Voice Methodology Practitioner Licenced Training. Find out more ....   ​https://www.interwovenproductions.com/organisationsfunders.html

---