Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of figures
- Author biographies
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction
- Section One Community development with ethnic minorities: history, theory, policy
- Section Two Building capacity with BME groups
- Section Three Working with Roma communities
- Section Four Global experience
- Section Five Working across cultural boundaries: ideological and personal reflections
- Afterword: Messages for community development in working with minority groups
- Index
Seven - Construindo comunidades: community building with Portuguese migrant workers on the east coast of England
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 April 2022
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of figures
- Author biographies
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction
- Section One Community development with ethnic minorities: history, theory, policy
- Section Two Building capacity with BME groups
- Section Three Working with Roma communities
- Section Four Global experience
- Section Five Working across cultural boundaries: ideological and personal reflections
- Afterword: Messages for community development in working with minority groups
- Index
Summary
Introduction
I tell you there is no sense of community here. The people, they think about themselves, not each other. It is why no one cares about the association. They all talk in the cafes and say ‘the association should do this and that’ and ‘when are we going to have another party?’ but no one wants to get involved unless they can make money.
This quote is taken from an interview in 2007 with a founding member of the Portuguese Community Association in Great Yarmouth. I use it as a starting point. The rhetoric of the New Labour Government of the time emphasised the importance of community engagement to support the integration of a new wave of migrant workers arriving to the UK. In Great Yarmouth, a medium-size seaside town surrounded by agricultural land where many migrants found employment, a community development response was subsequently interpreted as one in which robust community infrastructures such as the community association referenced above needed to be built. This was to ensure that Portuguese workers were empowered to overcome issues of exploitation, discrimination and disadvantage and were able to integrate more fully into local life.
I don't offer a conclusive account of the migrant worker experience in Great Yarmouth in this chapter but, rather, reflect on how community development responses over 10 years have evolved in a deprived coastal town in eastern England. I started working with newly arrived Portuguese-speaking migrants in the early 2000s as a community development worker for a local charity. I have since worked as a neighbourhood manager and then as a commissioner for community development employed through the local council. I have built a range of professional relationships and friendships with migrants over that time. While I possess strong local knowledge and an experiential insight into the migrant worker context in a particular coastal town, I am also mindful of the limits of my own objectivity. So too am I aware of my (in)ability to reflect these experiences, not as a migrant worker but as a White British male, from my own culturally crafted perspective.
Locating Portuguese migration
Great Yarmouth lies on the easterly tip of Norfolk, England.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Community Organising against Racism'Race', Ethnicity and Community Development, pp. 123 - 136Publisher: Bristol University PressPrint publication year: 2017