Grenfell: working with the Community

On Wednesday 1 December, Fatima Elguenuni, CNWL Community Consultant, and Robyn Doran, CNWL’s Chief Operating Officer, were interviewed by Dan Wellings, Senior Fellow, at the Kings Fund Annual Conference about Grenfell and coproducing services with the community.

The Kings Fund has featured the lessons of Grenfell consistently – the two example below are really good summaries of the points covered again in this session; as the saying goes, ‘repetition is the mother of learning.’

See the Kings Fund blog Learning the lessons from Grenfell: ‘our stories and our voice’  (In January 2020, Fatima, Robyn, Bellal and Natasha shared their thoughts on what happened at Grenfell, what they had learnt and what systems need to hear.)

And Learning from Grenfell: how can services better work with the communities they serve? (Grenfell United’s Natasha and Bellal’s view on engagement; however well-intentioned, their experience was of engagement as a separate activity, undertaken by certain staff and then fed back third hand to decision makers. ... it creates a distance between the community that needs to be heard and the people who can make change happen in response. The community voice can be sanitised, the impact diminished.)

Much of this ground was covered anew in the course of the conversation.

Robyn and Fatima spoke about the collective trauma of the community and how to create services that help that community and why this was an important approach for CNWL and the NHS, to really make a difference.

Fatima, who worked and lived in the area, knew the community very well, said, “The community felt a disconnect with services” and the key issues is, “how to connect the population with the services for them, in the right way and (being) culturally appropriate.”

Robyn recalled the first months; “people were angry as you’d expect and there were lots of big meetings, where there was more anger and shouting – high expressed emotion for all the reason you’d imagine.” But was that helping the service response?

The community also had to deal with what become known as ‘trauma tourists’. Robyn said, “I remember at one point people wanted protection from them as they were getting in the way – that needed honest conversations with them” but there needed to be more trust built by services in the community.

“The watershed moment”, said Robyn, “came when we were asked about what could we actually do? People said they wanted to go into the Tower – (which was organised); this changed the conversation and trust grew.”

It wasn’t ‘clinically recommended’ to revisit in this way but the community wanted this for all kinds of reasons.

It meant a gargantuan effort by all the services – NHS, Council, Ambulance, Police - to take scores of people safety into the Tower – with thorough physical and emotional preparation.

“We listened – mainly listened actually - said sorry when we got something wrong and though we didn’t realise it at the time, people were watching to see what we would do and that’s why it was a watershed moment.”

Robyn also took the lesson to New Zealand after the Christchurch terrorist killings.

More recently we adopted the same approach in Brent.

The media “uncovered a lot of unmet need (around covid) in Church End and Alperton ... the Somali community there wanted training and they wanted PPE – both of which we provided.”

Fatima said these were examples and that language around it should be to, “connect rather than engage –  to build bridges to the community.”

Robyn: “we need to train CNWL leaders to adopt this approach.”

‘Lucy’s Walk’ is named after a CNWL Staff member who lived in North Kensington and knew it very well. She was transferred into the Grenfell Health and Wellbeing Service and when people came to visit, we took them on the walk – the walk takes you round the community and you see lots of people at random and all the conversations from those encounters, tell you so much about what is needed.

Fatima ended with, “The Community is an asset not a problem, don’t assume our ‘solutions’ are ‘needs’; recruit from the local community too.”

(The talk is not yet publicly available, only to delegates at the event).