Ruby Quanson Davis shares insights on how we can go about gathering concerns from the community
Transcript
Today we’ll be speaking to Ruby Quanson Davis. Ruby is a scholar-practitioner with nearly 20 years of global experience in public policy research and advocacy, deliberative conversations, community engagement, and institutional development.
Ruby specializes in strengthening the capacity for conflict prevention and peace processes in places experiencing political polarization, religious differences, or ethnic, racial, and gender divides. She’s worked extensively within Africa and the South Pacific, in Israel and the United States, using innovative ways of reflecting, learning, documenting, and sharing knowledge. She is the Senior Advisor for Learning and Impact at Peace Direct, an international charity in London.
As we embark on this process of gathering and clustering concerns within our communities, we’ve asked Ruby to share some key insights on how we can go about this. Welcome, Ruby, and thank you so much for your time today. Thank you.
Ruby, to get us started, let’s talk about gathering concerns. What does it mean, and what are some of the key steps or things that someone doing this needs to consider? So when we talk about gathering concerns, I think we need to take a moment to say, why are we doing this? Why do we gather concerns? What concerns? Whose concerns? And I think for those of us working in communities and wanting to influence policy and to change the situation around us, we gather concerns because we want to have a feel of what the community is thinking and what the community wants. None of us practitioners should think we can sit in our offices, or researchers for that matter, or sit in our homes and just decide what we think the community wants.
So the notion of gathering concerns is stopping intentionally paying attention to what the community is saying. Gathering concerns is asking the community members and the people we work with what concerns you, what bothers you about this problem, about a particular problem. And so that is what we need to keep in mind.
And what are some of the key things we should consider when we decide to do this kind of concern gathering? I think one is, who is part of the process? And that is so important. We are all talking about inclusive governance, inclusive nation-building, people who have been excluded, and so on. So we need to say, who should be part of it? The reason you ask who should be part of this is also that the process of concern gathering towards public policy influence means that people have to take a role in solving the problem.
Now if you want me to solve the problem in our community, you better include me in defining the problem. You don’t go and decide on what to do and then expect me to come and fix the problem. So one thing you want to do is to be sure you know who is coming to the room, or who is gathering under the tree, or at the marketplace, or wherever it is that we are meeting.
And by this I mean diversity. A diverse group of people who live in the community. The conversation should reflect those affected by the problem.
The second thing that we perhaps need to think about when we talk about concern gathering is to be willing to document exactly what the community is saying. I think, you know, as practitioners and researchers, sometimes we are quick to interpret what the community is saying and sometimes we misrepresent it. So one thing that we need to bear in mind once people have come into the room or gathered under the tree or by the riverside or wherever we are is to document or to record what people are saying.
I think when you hold these two things, who comes and recording, the practice or habit that then remains in the middle is listening. To listen to what they have to say. Because you bring the people and you want to document what they are doing.
But how do you do that? You first need to listen. And at this point, you are listening to hear them. You are not listening to judge.
That’s not your place. You want people to be able to express what the community is saying. Thanks so much for that, Ruby.
And you talked about, you know, people coming or the person gathering concerns, you know, being a listener. Someone, you know, you don’t pass judgment. There’s no right or wrong answer.
So what are you, how would you describe then the role of the person gathering the concerns as our participants go out? You know, are they a facilitator? Are they a moderator? What exactly, you know, what kind of role must they be playing to ensure that they gather this multiplicity of concerns from diverse community members and people don’t feel as though they can’t truly express what they feel about a problem, about this problem that we are discussing? Right. I like the fact that you mentioned a role.
Because you can play a role which may not be your everyday role. And so you can be a member of the community yourself doing this work. And then you choose to play the role of the person who helps the community to gather the concerns.
You could also be an outsider. Most of us are outsiders in the communities that we go into. And so we go there and play a role that enables the community to gather their concerns.
And you mentioned, you know, is that a facilitator? Is that a moderator? I mean, we don’t want to get hung up on what the name is. However, what we want to point out is that you are there to keep a conversation going, to document the outcome, and to let people feel heard so they can make decisions around the problem. So I think when you keep that in mind, you know that you are not there as a chairperson.
You’re not there as the boss. You’re not there as the leader. Although it may sound as if you’re leading the process.
You know, I say this because sometimes our practices in our countries make it such that as soon as somebody’s standing in front of us, we defer to the person. It’s a leader. And if the person happens to be a little older, then that is even stronger, right? And we want to appreciate all our cultural values in this space.
But we also want to remember that the goal of the gathering is to get communities to speak up. So I often like to talk about the moderator because you’re not just there to keep something going, but also the moderator, as it were, moderates what is going on. You are not the centre of the conversation.
You are present and you keep the conversation going, but you are not the centre of it. So when we train moderators and when we send people out in the communities, we want them to know how not to be the centre and yet keep the conversation. The goal is to get people to talk, and to pose questions that will get them to talk.
So I think that is important as a role, regardless of whether you are from the community or not. And I need to say that, you know, sometimes, not even sometimes, you are a member of your country. You are a citizen of your country.
You know the issues. Do you have thoughts on the issues? So chances are that when people are speaking, you sometimes want to be able to share your view as well.
You know, I would advise people to suspend their views a little bit to allow the room to kind of warm-up because if you are too quick to put your view in and that view is contrary to perhaps what the majority in the room think or even somebody thinks, you know, chances are that the person will be quiet and that wouldn’t be a successful conversation. And so I would say allow the conversation to come up. And one way in which you bring your view is to pose a question.
So kind of say, how about this side of it? What about those who say this? Again, remove yourself from the centre because you are not the one driving this. And I think that role needs to be moderated. Great.
And as our participants take on this moderated kind of role, what are some of the key skills that are needed for this process and key skills as a moderators that they should have as they work with and engage communities in this process? Thanks. You know, I think there are some skills that we talk about in developmental work and community engagement that people know about, you know, showing leadership skills and all of that. And, you know, people know that.
I’m not going to highlight that too much. But one of the skills that I want to bring up, which we talk about every time, is listening, listening skills. And, you know, we all think we listen until somebody is saying something we don’t like, and then we begin to zoom out.
As people go into the community, I want them to be mindful of the fact that someone might say something they don’t like, but you are the facilitator, and you are the researcher, and you’re the moderator. You’ve got to listen. And by this, I’m not saying that you encourage bad ideas or dangerous ideas to be expressed.
Your role as a facilitator or moderator means you’ve got to protect people in this space. But you can’t do that till you’re listening very carefully. And don’t listen to react.
If I don’t even listen to respond, because with concerns gathering, you just want to hear what the people are saying. I want to put another quality to listening. I like to say, listen actively.
Now, that’s different from just sitting down, you know. We come from African cultures where we gesture, we have facial expressions, you know. And in other cultures, they are gestures you don’t make.
In certain cultures, if you’re too still, you are not engaging. So when I talk about active listening, there are those cultural connotations. But active listening is also listening to see and hear the person in front of you.
And as I said before, suspending judgment. You know, when you work in a volatile area or like a place of conflict and so on, and you have factions coming to talk, sometimes you feel like you have to correct people, you have to get to an agreement, so you rush the process. With concerns gathering, the goal is to get as much as we can from the community so that we can understand the nature of the problem we want to solve.
So listening actively, I would put at the top of this. And as I said before, recording what the community says. Sometimes I say record the voice of the community.
I don’t mean recording on an electronic gadget. Of course, you can do that with permission, the permission of the community. But even just writing on the blackboard or on flip charts or whichever way that the community uses, I would apply, you know, whatever would apply in those communities, I think we should.
But that’s the top skill I would kind of highlight with concerns gathering. Great. And you’ve talked about, you know, you’re trying to get diverse opinions, insights around the problem, you know, the public issue that needs to be resolved.
But we know that some people might not be in the room. How can the concerns of those not present in the room or the community that you’re engaging with still be captured in the process that you undertake with those who are in the room? Great question. So let me go back to something I said before, which is the reason we’re doing concerns gathering, the purpose of the gathering.
We’re doing this so that we can have a sense and understanding of the problem to solve the problem. Now, if you want to solve the problem, you need people to solve the problem. I mean, I know there’s AI and everything, but we still do need people in our communities.
So some of those problems might be sorted out by the states or state agencies. But most problems are solved by community members as well. So here is the thing.
If you think about the problem and the need to solve it, you’ve got to think about who needs to be in the room. Now, you have said well that you can’t have everybody in the room, but everybody can be represented as much as possible. So to the person who goes to have this conversation in their community, I would encourage you, after your first round of questions, you know, what concerns you, what bothers you about this problem, please take a moment to say who is not in the room and allow the community members or the participants to think for a moment.
You know, sometimes even have a pause, one or two minutes, and then give people little prompts. For instance, I would say, think about your mother. What would she say about this problem? Think about your sister.
Think about marginalized groups. Think about somebody incapable of walking into this room. Think about somebody with a disability.
How would they see this problem? Now, let’s make this a little practical. Let’s say we’re talking about unemployment. Unemployment for a 55-year-old man is quite different from unemployment to a 25-year-old woman.
Unemployment for somebody in a rural area might be different from somebody in an urban area, or unemployment will look different for different people at different times in their lives. So when we say who is not in the room, we are pushing the community to think widely. But also remember that what I said at the beginning, we would have to do this collaboratively.
So it is a good time to get the participants to think about who else they might be able to work with. And sometimes it’s not somebody who is immediately affected by the problem, but somebody who can facilitate the solution. It could be a business leader.
And so in the end, you’re like, we need to bring the private sector in. Well, how would they see this problem? We need to gather their concerns about the problem as well. So that’s what I would say about those prompts so that the community can think beyond their small bubble.
Great. So now we’ve gathered concerns, and possibly a lot of concerns. How does the clustering process now begin? Without it being overwhelming, but also ensuring that, as you’ve highlighted, you don’t lose the insights shared by the community.
They don’t feel as though, okay, you’ve now… In trying to maybe cluster or box or segment where these concerns lie, that it’s fallen off the table, it’s fallen off the plate, and it’s no longer… They don’t see themselves then, their concern any longer in this process. So how do we… Just a few key things as you begin clustering. One is that it’s not overwhelming for our participants who are undergoing this process, but they still ensure that they carry the community and its voice in what the output is produced.
Right. Once again, let’s kind of break it down and say, what is clustering? Because it seems like a big English word sometimes. What does that mean in our thinking and our languages? And I would encourage those going to the field to even find the local word or the vernacular word for it.
But to break it down even in English, the whole idea of clustering is things coming together, right? So you just painted a picture of us having, say, a full board or room of concerns. So let’s say we have unemployment, and somebody says, what concerns me about unemployment is that it causes crime. And somebody says it causes young people to do bad things or it causes depression.
So you’ve got so many things on the wall. The notion of clustering is grouping the emerging ideas from the host of concerns that you have gathered. Emerging ideas, what are the ideas here? And you can imagine that when you look at those concerns, it will look like a lot.
But the way that we begin to go through it is to take one of those concerns that they have mentioned and ask yourself, what is the real issue here? What is the real issue here? So again, let’s be a little practical. Let’s say we’re talking about unemployment, and somebody has mentioned security and somebody’s talking about youth and women and all that. And then you look at the security issue and you say, what about unemployment? What about security bothers you? Why is security the issue that bothers you when you talk about unemployment? And then maybe as you go into that, you might realize that the person is saying, well, because people don’t have jobs, sometimes they would take to some kind of ways to survive that may not always be positive.
It could be stealing. It could be whatever. And then you look at that issue and then realize that somebody else is saying, well, because they don’t have employment.
Well, the reason they don’t have employment is because they didn’t have an education. So we’re drawing a linkage between education, unemployment and insecurity. You’re beginning to see the cluster.
And then you say, what are these sets of concerns saying? They are probably all talking about a lack of education that gives access to employment. You start and it seems as if they’re saying different things. But when you cluster, you see the idea that runs through it.
So I want to stress what cluster isn’t, and what it is not. Clustering is not that moment when you throw things off. When you throw things off, you’ve thrown somebody’s idea off the table.
And actually, you’ve thrown somebody out of the community. Clustering is not just reducing the list of concerns. Clustering is seeing how the ideas come together, and what the linkages are because it is those linkages that will let you know what the real issue is.
When we all talk around the table, we mention different things. But if we take a moment to say, what is at the base of this issue you mentioned, you will see the linkages. So maybe on an issue of unemployment, after you have clustered, you will find that one cluster has to do with maybe poor education or lack of access to education.
But another cluster may be around security. And another cluster may be around failed government institutions or something. Soon, you would have three, four, five manageable clusters.
What do you do with this? This is when you are beginning to have a basis for conversation. And a lot of people worry about having dialogues or conversations that go in all directions. It’s because they don’t cluster.
Because everybody mentions, and we hope we can have a conversation with everybody’s hundred concerns. No. Clustering allows us to organize, and structure the conversation.
And people begin to see themselves in the cluster. And they also begin to say, oh, well, I didn’t realize that my concern is linked to hers. Now, you see what is happening? It’s not just the concerns coming together.
People’s minds are connecting. People are already beginning to collaborate. Do you remember what I said at the beginning? The goal is to collaborate, to influence policy and solve problems.
So that, I think, is the beautiful thing about clustering. Don’t throw things out. Great.
And I think on that powerful and impactful note, Ruby, thank you. Thank you so much for your time today and the insights that you’ve provided and shared with our group, I think will help them as they embark on this process. And we look forward to probably sharing with you just what the outcome has been and how participants have gone on with the process.
Thanks again, Ruby. And we’ll look forward to engaging with you on another topic related to our policy advocacy lab going forward. Thank you.
You’re all welcome and all the best. Thank you.